INSTITUTIONS AND THE INDIVIDUAL
THE NATURE OF INSTITUTIONS—HEREDITARY AND SOCIAL FACTORS—THE
CHILD AND THE WORLD—SOCIETY AND PERSONALITY—PERSONALITY VERSUS
THE INSTITUTION—THE INSTITUTION AS A BASIS OF PERSONALITY—THE
MORAL ASPECT—CHOICE VERSUS MECHANISM—PERSONALITY THE LIFE OF
INSTITUTIONS—INSTITUTIONS BECOMING FREER IN STRUCTURE.
An institution is simply a definite and established phase of the public
mind, not different in its ultimate nature from public opinion, though
often seeming, on account of its permanence and the visible customs
and symbols in which it is clothed, to have a somewhat distinct and
independent existence. Thus the political state and the church, with
their venerable associations, their vast and ancient power, their
literature, buildings and offices, hardly appear even to a democratic
people as the mere products of human invention which, of course, they
are.
The great institutions are the outcome of that organization which
human thought naturally takes on when it is directed for age after age
upon a particular subject, and so gradually crystallizes in definite
forms—enduring sentiments, beliefs, customs and symbols. And this is
the case when there is some deep and abiding interest to hold the
attention of men. Language, government, the church, laws and customs
of property and of the family, systems of industry and education, are
institutions because they are the working out of permanent needs of
human nature.
These various institutions are not separable entities, but rather
phases of a common and at least partly homogeneous body of thought,
just as are the various tendencies and convictions of an individual:
they are the “apperceptive systems” or organized attitudes of the
public mind, and it is only by abstraction that we can regard them as
things by themselves. We are to remember that the social system is
above all a whole, no matter how the convenience of study may lead us
to divide it.
In the individual the institution exists as a habit of mind and of
action, largely unconscious because largely common to all the group: it
is only the differential aspect of ourselves of which we are commonly
aware. But it is in men and nowhere else that the institution is to be
found. The real existence of the Constitution of the United States, for
example, is in the traditional ideas of the people and the activities
of judges, legislators and administrators; the written instrument being
only a means of communication, an Ark of the Covenant, ensuring the
integrity of the tradition.
The individual is always cause as well as effect of the institution:
he receives the impress of the state whose traditions have enveloped
him from childhood, but at the same time impresses his own character,
formed by other forces as well as this, upon the state, which thus in
him and others like him undergoes change.
If we think carefully about this matter, however, we shall see that
there are several somewhat different questions which might be included
in a study of the relation between the individual and institutions;
and these we ought to distinguish.
One of them is that of the babe to the world, or of the hereditary
factor of life, existing in us at birth, to the factor of communication
and influence.
Another and quite different one is that of society and personality, or
of the relation between the mature individual and the whole of which he
is a member.
A third is the question—again a distinct one—of the relation, not
between the person and society at large, but between him and particular
institutions. This last is the one with which we are more properly
concerned, but it may not be amiss to offer some observations on the
others.
The child at birth, when, we may suppose for convenience, society
has had no direct influence upon him, represents the race stock or
hereditary factor in life in antithesis to the factor of tradition,
communication and social organization. He also represents an
undeveloped or merely biological individuality in contrast to the
developed social whole into which he comes.
We think of the social world as the mature, organized, institutional
factor in the problem; and yet we may well say that the child also
embodies an institution (using the word largely) and one more ancient
and stable than church or state, namely the biological type, little
changed, probably, since the dawn of history. It cannot be shown in
any way that I know of that the children born to-day of English or
American parents—leaving aside any question of race mixture—are greatly
different in natural outfit from the Saxon boys and girls, their
ancestors, who played upon the banks of the Elbe fifteen hundred years
ago. The rooted instincts and temperament of races appear to be very
much what they were, and the changes of history—the development of
political institutions, the economic revolutions, the settlement of
new countries, the Reformation, the rise of science and the like—are
changes mainly in the social factor of life, which thus appears
comparatively a shifting thing.
In the development of the child, then, we have to do with the
interaction of two types, both of which are ancient and stable, though
one more so than the other. And the stir and generation of human
life is precisely in the mingling of these types and in the many
variations of each one. The hereditary outfit of a child consists of
vague tendencies or aptitudes which get definiteness and meaning only
through the communicative influences which enable them to develop. Thus
babbling is instinctive, while speech comes by this instinct being
defined and instructed in society; curiosity comes by nature, knowledge
by life; fear, in a vague, instinctive form, is supposed to be felt
even by the fœtus, but the fears of later life are chiefly social
fears; there is an instinctive sensibility which develops into sympathy
and love; and so on.
Nothing is more futile than general discussions of the relative
importance of heredity and environment. It is much like the case of
matter _versus_ mind; both are indispensable to every phase of life,
and neither can exist apart from the other: they are coördinate in
importance and incommensurable in nature. One might as well ask
whether the soil or the seed predominates in the formation of a tree,
as whether nature does more for us than nurture. The fact that most
writers have a predilection for one of these factors at the expense
of the other (Mr. Galton and the biological school, for example,
seeing heredity everywhere, and not much else, while psychologists and
sociologists put the stress on influence) means only that some are
trained to attend to one class of facts and some to another. One may be
more relevant for a given practical purpose than the other, but to make
a general opposition is unintelligent.
To the eye of sentiment a new-born child offers a moving contrast
to the ancient and grimy world into which it so innocently enters;
the one formed, apparently, for all that is pure and good, “trailing
clouds of glory” as some think, from a more spiritual world than ours,
pathetically unconscious of anything but joy; the other gray and
saturnine, sure to prove in many ways a prison-house, perhaps a foul
one.
“Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight.”[134]
No doubt, however, the pathos of this contrast arises in part from
somewhat fallacious preconceptions. The imagination idealizes the
child, reading its own visions into his innocence as it does into the
innocence of the sea and the mountains, and contrasting his future
career not with what he is, but with an ideal of what he might become.
In truth the child already feels, in his own way, the painful side of
life; he has the seeds of darkness in him as well as those of light,
and cannot in strictness be said to be any better than the world. The
good of life transcends his imagination as much as does the evil, and
he could not become anything at all except in a social world. The pity
of the matter, which may well move every one who thinks of it to work
for better homes, schools and playgrounds, is simply that we are about
to make so poor a use of a plastic material, that he might be so much
better and happier if we would prepare a better place for him.
It is true, in a sense, as Bacon says, that youth has more of divinity,
but perhaps we might also say that it has more of deviltry; the younger
life is, the more unbound it is, not yet in harness, with more divine
insight and more reckless passion, and adolescence is the period of
criminality as well as of poetry.
There is a natural affinity between childhood and democracy; the latter
implying, indeed, that we are to become more as little children, more
simple, frank and human. And it is a very proper part of the democratic
movement that more and more prestige is attaching to childhood, that
it is more studied, cherished and respected. Probably nothing else
gives such cogency to the idea of reform as to think of what it means
to children. We wish to know that all the children of the land are
happily unfolding their minds and hearts at home, school and play; and
that there is a gradual induction into useful work, which also proceeds
regularly and happily. This calls for better homes and neighborhoods,
and the overcoming of conditions that degrade them; it implies
better schools, the suppression of child-labor, regular industrial
education, wholesome and fairly paid work and reasonable security of
position. While the child is not exactly better than the world, his
possibilities make us feel that the world ought to be better for his
sake.
As fast as a child becomes a person, he also becomes a member of the
existing social order. This is simply a case of a whole and one of its
differentiated parts; having so often insisted that society and the
individual are aspects of the same thing, I need not enlarge upon it
here. Even the degenerate, so far as they have faculty enough to be
human, live in the social order and are as much one with it as the rest
of mankind. We simply cannot separate the individual from society at
large; to get a contrast we must pass on to consider him in relation to
particular institutions, or to institutions in general as distinguished
from more plastic phases of life.
An institution is a mature, specialized and comparatively rigid part
of the social structure. It is made up of persons, but not of whole
persons; each one enters into it with a trained and specialized part
of himself. Consider, for instance, the legal part of a lawyer, the
ecclesiastical part of a church member or the business part of a
merchant. In antithesis to the institution, therefore, the person
represents the wholeness and humanness of life; he is, as Professor
Alfred Lloyd says,[135] “a corrector of partiality, and a translator
and distributor of special development.” A man is no man at all if
he is merely a piece of an institution; he must stand also for human
nature, for the instinctive, the plastic and the ideal.
The saying that corporations have no soul expresses well enough
this defect of all definite social structures, which gives rise to
an irrepressible conflict between them and the freer and larger
impulses of human nature. Just in proportion as they achieve an
effective special mechanism for a narrow purpose, they lose humanness,
breadth and adaptability. As we have to be specially on our guard
against commercial corporations, because of their union of power and
impersonality, so we should be against all institutions.
The institution represents might, and also, perhaps, right, but right
organized, mature, perhaps gone to seed, never fresh and unrecognized.
New right, or moral progress, always begins in a revolt against
institutions.
I have in mind a painting which may be said to set forth to the
eye this relation between the living soul and the institution. It
represents St. James before the Roman Emperor.[136] The former is
poorly clad, beautiful, with rapt, uplifted face; the latter majestic,
dominant, assured, seated high on his ivory chair and surrounded by
soldiers.
Of course the institutional element is equally essential with the
personal. The mechanical working of tradition and convention pours
into the mind the tried wisdom of the race, a system of thought
every part of which has survived because it was, in some sense, the
fittest, because it approved itself to the human spirit. In this way
the individual gets language, sentiments, moral standards and all
kinds of knowledge: gets them with an exertion of the will trifling
compared with what these things originally cost. They have become a
social atmosphere which pervades the mind mostly without its active
participation. Once the focus of attention and effort, they have now
receded into the dimness of the matter-of-course, leaving energy free
for new conquests. On this involuntary foundation we build, and it
needs no argument to show that we could accomplish nothing without it.
Thus all innovation is based on conformity, all heterodoxy on
orthodoxy, all individuality on solidarity. Without the orthodox
tradition in biology, for instance, under the guidance of which a
store of ordered knowledge had been collected, the heterodoxy of
Darwin, based on a reinterpretation of this knowledge, would have been
impossible. And so in art, the institution supplies a basis to the very
individual who rebels against it. Mr. Brownell, in his work on French
Art, points out, in discussing the relation of Rodin the innovating
sculptor to the French Institute, that he owes his development and
the interest his non-conformity excites largely to “the very system
that has been powerful enough to popularize indefinitely the subject
both of subscription and revolt.”[137] In America it is not hostile
criticism but no criticism at all—sheer ignorance and indifference—that
discourages the artist and man of letters and makes it difficult to
form a high ideal. Where there is an organized tradition there may be
intolerance but there will also be intelligence.
Thus choice, which represents the relatively free action of human
nature in building up life, is like the coral insect, always working
on a mountain made up of the crystallized remains of dead predecessors.
It is a mistake to suppose that the person is, in general, _better_
than the institution. Morally, as in other respects, there are
advantages on each side. The person has love and aspiration and all
sorts of warm, fresh, plastic impulses, to which the institution is
seldom hospitable, but the latter has a sober and tried goodness of the
ages, the deposit, little by little, of what has been found practicable
in the wayward and transient outreachings of human idealism. The law,
the state, the traditional code of right and wrong, these are related
to personality as a gray-haired father to a child. However world-worn
and hardened by conflict, they are yet strong and wise and kind, and we
do well in most matters to obey them.
A similar line of reasoning applies to the popular fallacy that a
nation is of necessity less moral in its dealings with other nations
than an individual with other individuals. International morality is
on a low plane because it is recent and undeveloped, not from any
inevitable defect in its nature. It is slow to grow, like anything else
of an institutional character, but there is no reason why it should
not eventually express the utmost justice and generosity of which we
are capable. All depends upon the energy and persistence with which
people try to effectuate their ideals in this sphere. The slowness of
an institution is compensated by its capacity for age-long cumulative
growth, and in this way it may outstrip, even morally, the ordinary
achievement of individuals—as the Christian Church, for example, stands
for ideals beyond the attainment of most of its members. If we set our
hearts on having a righteous state we can have one more righteous than
any individual.
The treatment of Cuba by the United States and the suppression of the
slave-trade by the British are examples of nations acting upon generous
principles which we may reasonably expect to extend as time goes on. As
the need of international justice and peace becomes keenly felt, its
growth becomes as natural as the analogous process in an individual.
Whenever the question is raised between choice and mechanism,[138] the
advocates of the latter may justly claim that it saves energy, and may
demand whether, in a given case, the results of choice justify its cost.
Thus choice, working on a large scale, is competition, and the only
alternative is some mechanical principle, either the inherited status
of history or some new rule of stability to be worked out, perhaps, by
socialism. Yet the present competitive order is not unjustly censured
as wasteful, harassing, unjust and hostile to the artistic spirit.
Choice is working somewhat riotously, without an adequate basis of
established principles and standards, and so far as socialism is
seeking these it is doing well.
Carlyle and others have urged with much reason that the mediæval
workman, hemmed in as he was by mechanical and to us unreasonable
restrictions, was in some respects better off than his modern
successor. There was less freedom of opportunity, but also less strain,
ugliness and despair; and the standards of the day were perhaps better
maintained than ours are now.
We need a better discipline, a more adequate organization; the
competent student can hardly fail to see this; but these things do not
exist ready-made, and our present task seems to be to work them out,
at the expense, doubtless, of other objects toward which, in quieter
times, choice might be directed.
Thus it is from the interaction of personality and institutions that
progress comes. The person represents more directly that human nature
which it is the end of all institutions to serve, but the institution
represents the net result of a development far transcending any single
personal consciousness. The person will criticise, and be mostly in the
wrong, but not altogether. He will attack, and mostly fail, but from
many attacks change will ensue.
It is also true that although institutions stand, in a general way,
for the more mechanical phase of life, they yet require, within
themselves, an element of personal freedom. Individuality, provided it
be in harness, is the life of institutions, all vigor and adaptability
depending upon it.
An army is the type of a mechanical institution; and yet, even
in an army, individual choice, confined of course within special
channels, is vital to the machine. In the German army, according to a
competent observer, there is a systematic culture of self-reliance,
a “development of the individual powers by according liberty to the
utmost extent possible with the maintenance of the necessary system
and discipline.” “To the commandant of the company is left the entire
responsibility for the instruction of his men, in what mode and at
what hour he may see fit,” and “a like freedom is accorded to every
officer charged with every branch whatsoever of instruction,” while
“the intelligence and self-reliance of the soldier is constantly
appealed to.”[139] In American armies the self-reliant spirit of
the soldier and the common-sense and adaptability developed by our
rough-and-ready civilization have always been of the utmost value.
Nor are they unfavorable to discipline, that “true discipline of the
soldiers of freedom, a discipline which must arise from individual
conviction of duty and is very different from the compulsory discipline
of the soldier of despotism.”[140] Thus, in the battle of Gettysburg,
when Pickett’s charge broke the Federal line, and when for the moment,
owing to the death of many officers, the succession of command was
lost, it is said that the men without orders took up a position which
enabled them to crush the invading column.
As the general character of organization becomes freer and more human,
both the mechanical and the choosing elements of the institution
rise to a higher plane. The former ceases to be an arbitrary and
intolerant law, upheld by fear, by supernatural sanctions and the
suppression of free speech; and tends to become simply a settled habit
of thought, settled not because discussion is stifled but because it is
superfluous, because the habit of thought has so proved its fitness to
existing conditions that there is no prospect of shaking it.
Thus in a free modern state, the political system, fundamental
property rights and the like are settled, so far as they are settled,
not because they are sacred or authoritative, but because the public
mind is convinced of their soundness. Though we may not reason about
them they are, so to speak, potentially rational, inasmuch as they are
believed to rest upon reason and may at any time be tested by it.
The advantages and disadvantages of this sort of institutions are well
understood. They do not afford quite the sharp and definite discipline
of a more arbitrary system, but they are more flexible, more closely
expressive of the public mind, and so, if they can be made to work at
all, more stable.
The free element in institutions also tends to become better informed,
better trained, better organized, more truly rational. We have so many
occasions to note this that it is unnecessary to dwell upon it here.
FOOTNOTES:
[134] Wordsworth, Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, etc.
[135] In a paper on The Personal and the Factional in the Life of
Society. The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods,
1905, p. 337.
[136] By Mantegna.
[137] Page 30. See also the last chapter.
[138] I mean by mechanism anything in the way of habit, authority or
formula that tends to dispense with choice.
[139] Baring-Gould, Germany, i, 350 _ff._
[140] Garibaldi’s Autobiography, i, 105.