_Uses of Symbolism_
The attitude of mankind towards symbolism exhibits an unstable mixture
of attraction and repulsion. The practical intelligence, the theoretical
desire to pierce to ultimate fact, and ironic critical impulses have
contributed the chief motives towards the repulsion from symbolism.
Hard-headed men want facts and not symbols. A clear theoretic intellect,
with its generous enthusiasm for the exact truth at all costs and
hazards, pushes aside symbols as being mere make-believes, veiling and
distorting that inner sanctuary of simple truth which reason claims as
its own. The ironic critics of the follies of humanity have performed
notable service in clearing away the lumber of useless ceremony
symbolizing the degrading fancies of a savage past. The repulsion from
symbolism stands out as a well-marked element in the cultural history of
civilized people. There can be no reasonable doubt but that this
continuous criticism has performed a necessary service in the promotion
of a wholesome civilization, both on the side of the practical
efficiency of organized society, and on the side of a robust direction
of thought.
No account of the uses of symbolism is complete without this recognition
that the symbolic elements in life have a tendency to run wild, like the
vegetation in a tropical forest. The life of humanity can easily be
overwhelmed by its symbolic accessories. A continuous process of
pruning, and of adaptation to a future ever requiring new forms of
expression, is a necessary function in every society. The successful
adaptation of old symbols to changes of social structure is the final
mark of wisdom in sociological statesmanship. Also an occasional
revolution in symbolism is required.
There is, however, a Latin proverb upon which, in our youth, some of us
have been set to write themes. In English it reads thus:—Nature,
expelled with a pitchfork, ever returns. This proverb is exemplified by
the history of symbolism. However you may endeavour to expel it, it ever
returns. Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is
inherent in the very texture of human life. Language itself is a
symbolism. And, as another example, however you reduce the functions of
your government to their utmost simplicity, yet symbolism remains. It
may be a healthier, manlier ceremonial, suggesting finer notions. But
still it is symbolism. You abolish the etiquette of a royal court, with
its suggestion of personal subordination, but at official receptions you
ceremonially shake the hand of the Governor of your State. Just as the
feudal doctrine of a subordination of classes, reaching up to the
ultimate overlord, requires its symbolism; so does the doctrine of human
equality obtain its symbolism. Mankind, it seems, has to find a symbol
in order to express itself. Indeed ‘expression’ is ‘symbolism.’
When the public ceremonial of the State has been reduced to the barest
simplicity, private clubs and associations at once commence to
reconstitute symbolic actions. It seems as though mankind must always be
masquerading. This imperative impulse suggests that the notion of an
idle masquerade is the wrong way of thought about the symbolic elements
in life. The function of these elements is to be definite, manageable,
reproducible, and also to be charged with their own emotional
efficacity: symbolic transference invests their correlative meanings
with some or all of these attributes of the symbols, and thereby lifts
the meanings into an intensity of definite effectiveness—as elements in
knowledge, emotion, and purpose,—an effectiveness which the meanings
may, or may not, deserve on their own account. The object of symbolism
is the enhancement of the importance of what is symbolized.
In a discussion of instances of symbolism, our first difficulty is to
discover exactly what is being symbolized. The symbols are specific
enough, but it is often extremely difficult to analyse what lies beyond
them, even though there is evidently some strong appeal beyond the mere
ceremonial acts.
It seems probable that in any ceremonial which has lasted through many
epochs, the symbolic interpretation, so far as we can obtain it, varies
much more rapidly than does the actual ceremonial. Also in its flux a
symbol will have different meanings for different people. At any epoch
some people have the dominant mentality of the past, some of the
present, others of the future, and others of the many problematic
futures which will never dawn. For these various groups an old symbolism
will have different shades of vague meaning.
In order to appreciate the necessary function of symbolism in the life
of any society of human beings we must form some estimate of the binding
and disruptive forces at work. There are many varieties of human
society, each requiring its own particular investigation so far as
details are concerned. We will fix attention on nations, occupying
definite countries. Thus geographical unity is at once presupposed.
Communities with geographical unity constitute the primary type of
communities which we find in the world. Indeed the lower we go in the
scale of being, the more necessary is geographical unity for that close
interaction of individuals which constitutes society. Societies of the
higher animals, of insects, of molecules, all possess geographical
unity. A rock is nothing else than a society of molecules, indulging in
every species of activity open to molecules. I draw attention to this
lowly form of society in order to dispel the notion that social life is
a peculiarity of the higher organisms. The contrary is the case. So far
as survival value is concerned, a piece of rock, with its past history
of some eight hundred millions of years, far outstrips the short span
attained by any nation. The emergence of life is better conceived as a
bid for freedom on the part of organisms, a bid for a certain
independence of individuality with self-interests and activities not to
be construed purely in terms of environmental obligations. The immediate
effect of this emergence of sensitive individuality has been to reduce
the term of life for societies from hundreds of millions of years to
hundreds of years, or even to scores of years.
The emergence of living beings cannot be ascribed to the superior
survival value either of the individuals, or of their societies.
National life has to face the disruptive elements introduced by these
extreme claims for individual idiosyncrasies. We require both the
advantages of social preservation, and the contrary stimulus of the
heterogeneity derived from freedom. The society is to run smoothly
amidst the divergencies of its individuals. There is a revolt from the
mere causal obligations laid upon individuals by the social character of
the environment. This revolt first takes the form of blind emotional
impulse; and later, in civilized societies, these impulses are
criticized and deflected by reason. In any case, there are individual
springs of action which escape from the obligations of social
conformity. In order to replace this decay of secure instinctive
response, various intricate forms of symbolic expression of the various
purposes of social life have been introduced. The response to the symbol
is almost automatic but not quite; the reference to the meaning is
there, either for additional emotional support, or for criticism. But
the reference is not so clear as to be imperative. The imperative
instinctive conformation to the influence of the environment has been
modified. Something has replaced it, which by its superficial character
invites criticism, and by its habitual use generally escapes it. Such
symbolism makes connected thought possible by expressing it, while at
the same time it automatically directs action. In the place of the force
of instinct which suppresses individuality, society has gained the
efficacy of symbols, at once preservative of the commonweal and of the
individual standpoint.
Among the particular kinds of symbolism which serve this purpose, we
must place first Language. I do not mean language in its function of a
bare indication of abstract ideas, or of particular actual things, but
language clothed with its complete influence for the nation in question.
In addition to its bare indication of meaning, words and phrases carry
with them an enveloping suggestiveness and an emotional efficacy. This
function of language depends on the way it has been used, on the
proportionate familiarity of particular phrases, and on the emotional
history associated with their meanings and thence derivatively
transferred to the phrases themselves. If two nations speak the same
language, this emotional efficacy of words and phrases will in general
differ for the two. What is familiar for one nation will be strange for
the other nation; what is charged with intimate associations for the one
is comparatively empty for the other. For example, if the two nations
are somewhat widely sundered, with a different fauna and flora, the
nature-poetry of one nation will lack its complete directness of appeal
to the other nation—compare Walt Whitman’s phrase,
‘The wide unconscious scenery of my land’
for an American, with Shakespeare’s
‘... this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,’
for an Englishman. Of course anyone, American or English, with the
slightest sense for history and kinship, or with the slightest
sympathetic imagination, can penetrate to the feelings conveyed by both
phrases. But the direct first-hand intuition, derived from earliest
childhood memories, is for the one nation that of continental width, and
for the other nation that of the little island world. Now the love of
the sheer geographical aspects of one’s country, of its hills, its
mountains, and its plains, of its trees, its flowers, its birds, and its
whole nature-life, is no small element in that binding force which makes
a nation. It is the function of language, working through literature and
through the habitual phrases of early life, to foster this diffused
feeling of the common possession of a treasure infinitely precious.
I must not be misunderstood to mean that this example has any unique
importance. It is only one example of what can be illustrated in a
hundred ways. Also language is not the only symbolism effective for this
purpose. But in an especial manner, language binds a nation together by
the common emotions which it elicits, and is yet the instrument whereby
freedom of thought and of individual criticism finds its expression.
My main thesis is that a social system is kept together by the blind
force of instinctive actions, and of instinctive emotions clustered
around habits and prejudices. It is therefore not true that any advance
in the scale of culture inevitably tends to the preservation of society.
On the whole, the contrary is more often the case, and any survey of
nature confirms this conclusion. A new element in life renders in many
ways the operation of the old instincts unsuitable. But unexpressed
instincts are unanalysed and blindly felt. Disruptive forces, introduced
by a higher level of existence, are then warring in the dark against an
invisible enemy. There is no foothold for the intervention of ‘rational
consideration’—to use Henry Osborn Taylor’s admirable phrase. The
symbolic expression of instinctive forces drags them out into the open:
it differentiates them and delineates them. There is then opportunity
for reason to effect, with comparative speed, what otherwise must be
left to the slow operation of the centuries amid ruin and
reconstruction. Mankind misses its opportunities, and its failures are a
fair target for ironic criticism. But the fact that reason too often
fails does not give fair ground for the hysterical conclusion that it
never succeeds. Reason can be compared to the force of gravitation, the
weakest of all natural forces, but in the end the creator of suns and of
stellar systems:—those great societies of the Universe. Symbolic
expression first preserves society by adding emotion to instinct, and
secondly it affords a foothold for reason by its delineation of the
particular instinct which it expresses. This doctrine of the disruptive
tendency due to novelties, even those involving a rise to finer levels,
is illustrated by the effect of Christianity on the stability of the
Roman Empire. It is also illustrated by the three revolutions which
secured liberty and equality for the world—namely the English
revolutionary period of the seventeenth century, the American
Revolution, and the French Revolution. England barely escaped a
disruption of its social system; America was never in any such danger;
France, where the entrance of novelty was most intense, did for a time
experience this collapse. Edmund Burke, the Whig statesman of the
eighteenth century, was the philosopher who was the approving prophet of
the two earlier revolutions, and the denunciatory prophet of the French
Revolution. A man of genius and a statesman, who has immediately
observed two revolutions, and has meditated deeply on a third, deserves
to be heard when he speaks on the forces which bind and disrupt
societies. Unfortunately statesmen are swayed by the passions of the
moment, and Burke shared this defect to the full, so as to be carried
away by the reactionary passions aroused by the French Revolution. Thus
the wisdom of his general conception of social forces is smothered by
the wild unbalanced conclusions which he drew from them: his greatness
is best shown by his attitude towards the American Revolution. His more
general reflections are contained first, in his youthful work _A
Vindication of Natural Society_, and secondly, in his _Reflections on
the French Revolution_. The earlier work was meant ironically; but, as
is often the case with genius, he prophesied unknowingly. This essay is
practically written round the thesis that advances in the art of
civilization are apt to be destructive of the social system. Burke
conceived this conclusion to be a _reductio ad absurdum_. But it is the
truth. The second work—a work which in its immediate effect was perhaps
the most harmful ever written—directs attention to the importance of
‘prejudice’ as a binding social force. There again I hold that he was
right in his premises and wrong in his conclusions.
Burke surveys the standing miracle of the existence of an organised
society, culminating in the smooth unified action of the state. Such a
society may consist of millions of individuals, each with its individual
character, its individual aims, and its individual selfishness. He asks
what is the force which leads this throng of separate units to coöperate
in the maintenance of an organised state, in which each individual has
his part to play—political, economic, and Æsthetic. He contrasts the
complexity of the functionings of a civilised society with the sheer
diversities of its individual citizens considered as a mere group or
crowd. His answer to the riddle is that the magnetic force is
‘prejudice,’ or in other words, ‘use and wont.’ Here he anticipates the
whole modern theory of ‘herd psychology,’ and at the same time deserts
the fundamental doctrine of the Whig party, as formed in the seventeenth
century and sanctioned by Locke. This conventional Whig doctrine was
that the state derived its origin from an ‘original contract’ whereby
the mere crowd voluntarily organised itself into a society. Such a
doctrine seeks the origin of the state in a baseless historical fiction.
Burke was well ahead of his time in drawing attention to the importance
of precedence as a political force. Unfortunately, in the excitement of
the moment, Burke construed the importance of precedence as implying the
negation of progressive reform.
Now, when we examine how a society bends its individual members to
function in conformity with its needs, we discover that one important
operative agency is our vast system of inherited symbolism. There is an
intricate expressed symbolism of language and of act, which is spread
throughout the community, and which evokes fluctuating apprehension of
the basis of common purposes. The particular direction of individual
action is directly correlated to the particular sharply defined symbols
presented to him at the moment. The response of action to symbol may be
so direct as to cut out any effective reference to the ultimate thing
symbolized. This elimination of meaning is termed reflex action.
Sometimes there does intervene some effective reference to the meaning
of the symbol. But this meaning is not recalled with the particularity
and definiteness which would yield any rational enlightenment as to the
specific action required to secure the final end. The meaning is vague
but insistent. Its insistence plays the part of hypnotizing the
individual to complete the specific action associated with the symbol.
In the whole transaction, the elements which are clear-cut and definite
are the specific symbols and the actions which should issue from the
symbols. But in themselves the symbols are barren facts whose direct
associative force would be insufficient to procure automatic conformity.
There is not sufficient repetition, or sufficient similarity of diverse
occasions, to secure mere automatic obedience. But in fact the symbol
evokes loyalties to vaguely conceived notions, fundamental for our
spiritual natures. The result is that our natures are stirred to suspend
all antagonistic impulses, so that the symbol procures its required
response in action. Thus the social symbolism has a double meaning. It
means pragmatically the direction of individuals to specific actions;
and it also means theoretically the vague ultimate reasons with their
emotional accompaniments, whereby the symbols acquire their power to
organize the miscellaneous crowd into a smoothly running community.
The contrast between a state and an army illustrates this principle. A
state deals with a greater complexity of situation than does its army.
In this sense it is a looser organization, and in regard to the greater
part of its population the communal symbolism cannot rely for its
effectiveness on the frequent recurrence of almost identical situations.
But a disciplined regiment is trained to act as a unit in a definite set
of situations. The bulk of human life escapes from the reach of this
military discipline. The regiment is drilled for one species of job. The
result is that there is more reliance on automatism, and less reliance
on the appeal to ultimate reasons. The trained soldier acts
automatically on receiving the word of command. He responds to the sound
and cuts out the idea; this is reflex action. But the appeal to the
deeper side is still important in an army; although it is provided for
in another set of symbols, such as the flag, and the memorials of the
honourable service of the regiment, and other symbolic appeals to
patriotism. Thus in an army there is one set of symbols to produce
automatic obedience in a limited set of circumstances, and there is
another set of symbols to produce a general sense of the importance of
the duties performed. This second set prevents random reflection from
sapping automatic response to the former set.
For the greater number of citizens of a state there is in practice no
reliable automatic obedience to any symbol such as the word of command
for soldiers, except in a few instances such as the response to the
signals of the traffic police. Thus the state depends in a very
particular way upon the prevalence of symbols which combine direction to
some well-known course of action with some deeper reference to the
purpose of the state. The self-organisation of society depends on
commonly diffused symbols evoking commonly diffused ideas, and at the
same time indicating commonly understood actions. Usual forms of verbal
expression are the most important example of such symbolism. Also the
heroic aspect of the history of the country is the symbol for its
immediate worth.
When a revolution has sufficiently destroyed this common symbolism
leading to common actions for usual purposes, society can only save
itself from dissolution by means of a reign of terror. Those revolutions
which escape a reign of terror have left intact the fundamental
efficient symbolism of society. For example, the English revolutions of
the seventeenth century and the American revolution of the eighteenth
century left the ordinary life of their respective communities nearly
unchanged. When George Washington had replaced George III, and Congress
had replaced the English Parliament, Americans were still carrying on a
well-understood system so far as the general structure of their social
life was concerned. Life in Virginia must have assumed no very different
aspect from that which it had exhibited before the revolution. In
Burke’s phraseology, the prejudices on which Virginian society depended
were unbroken. The ordinary signs still beckoned people to their
ordinary actions, and suggested the ordinary common-sense justification.
One difficulty of explaining my meaning is that the intimate effective
symbolism consists of the various types of expression which permeate
society and evoke a sense of common purpose. No one detail is of much
importance. The whole range of symbolic expression is required. A
national hero, such as George Washington or Jefferson, is a symbol of
the common purpose which animates American life. This symbolic function
of great men is one of the difficulties in obtaining a balanced
historical judgment. There is the hysteria of depreciation, and there is
the opposite hysteria which dehumanises in order to exalt. It is very
difficult to exhibit the greatness without losing the human being. Yet
we know that at least _we_ are human beings; and half the inspiration of
our heroes is lost when we forget that _they_ were human beings.
I mention great Americans, because I am speaking in America. But exactly
the same truth holds for the great men of all countries and ages.
The doctrine of symbolism developed in these lectures enables us to
distinguish between pure instinctive action, reflex action, and
symbolically conditioned action. Pure instinctive action is that
functioning of an organism which is wholly analysable in terms of those
conditions laid upon its development by the settled facts of its
external environment, conditions describable without any reference to
its perceptive mode of presentational immediacy. This pure instinct is
the response of an organism to pure causal efficacy.
According to this definition, pure instinct is the most primitive type
of response which is yielded by organisms to the stimulus of their
environment. All physical response on the part of inorganic matter to
its environment is thus properly to be termed instinct. In the case of
organic matter, its primary difference from inorganic nature is its
greater delicacy of internal mutual adjustment of minute parts and, in
some cases, its emotional enhancement. Thus instinct, or this immediate
adjustment to immediate environment, becomes more prominent in its
function of directing action for the purposes of the living organism.
The world is a community of organisms; these organisms in the mass
determine the environmental influence on any one of them; there can only
be a persistent community of persistent organisms when the environmental
influence in the shape of instinct is favourable to the survival of the
individuals. Thus the community as an environment is responsible for the
survival of the separate individuals which compose it; and these
separate individuals are responsible for their contributions to the
environment. Electrons and molecules survive because they satisfy this
primary law for a stable order of nature in connection with given
societies of organisms.
Reflex action is a relapse towards a more complex type of instinct on
the part of organisms which enjoy, or have enjoyed, symbolically
conditioned action. Thus its discussion must be postponed. Symbolically
conditioned action arises in the higher organisms which enjoy the
perceptive mode of presentational immediacy, that is to say,
sense-presentation of the contemporary world. This sense-presentation
symbolically promotes an analysis of the massive perception of causal
efficacy. The causal efficacy is thereby perceived as analysed into
components with the locations in space primarily belonging to the
sense-presentations. In the case of perceived organisms external to the
human body, the spatial discrimination involved in the human perception
of their pure causal efficacy is so feeble, that practically there is no
check on this symbolic transference, apart from the indirect check of
pragmatic consequences,—in other words, either survival-value, or
self-satisfaction, logical and Æsthetic.
Symbolically conditioned action is action which is thus conditioned by
the analysis of the perceptive mode of causal efficacy effected by
symbolic transference from the perceptive mode of presentational
immediacy. This analysis may be right or wrong, according as it does, or
does not, conform to the actual distribution of the efficacious bodies.
In so far as it is sufficiently correct under normal circumstances, it
enables an organism to conform its actions to long-ranged analysis of
the particular circumstances of its environment. So far as this type of
action prevails, pure instinct is superseded. This type of action is
greatly promoted by thought, which uses the symbols as referent to their
meanings. There is no sense in which pure instinct can be wrong. But
symbolically conditioned action can be wrong, in the sense that it may
arise from a false symbolic analysis of causal efficacy.
Reflex action is that organic functioning which is wholly dependent on
sense-presentation, unaccompanied by any analysis of causal efficacy via
symbolic reference. The conscious analysis of perception is primarily
concerned with the analysis of the symbolic relationship between the two
perceptive modes. Thus reflex action is hindered by thought, which
inevitably promotes the prominence of symbolic reference.
Reflex action arises when by the operation of symbolism the organism has
acquired the habit of action in response to immediate sense-perception,
and has discarded the symbolic enhancement of causal efficacy. It thus
represents the relapse from the high-grade activity of symbolic
reference. This relapse is practically inevitable in the absence of
conscious attention. Reflex action cannot in any sense be said to be
wrong, though it may be unfortunate.
Thus the important binding factor in a community of insects probably
falls under the notion of pure instinct, as here defined. For each
individual insect is probably such an organism that the causal
conditions which it inherits from the immediate past are adequate to
determine its social actions. But reflex action plays its subordinate
part. For the sense-perceptions of the insects have in certain fields of
action assumed an automatic determination of the insects’ activities.
Still more feebly, symbolically conditioned action intervenes for such
situations when the sense-presentation provides a symbolically defined
specification of the causal situation. But only active thought can save
symbolically conditioned action from quickly relapsing into reflex
action. The most successful examples of community life exist when pure
instinct reigns supreme. These examples occur only in the inorganic
world; among societies of active molecules forming rocks, planets, solar
systems, star clusters.
The more developed type of living communities requires the successful
emergence of sense-perception to delineate successfully causal efficacy
in the external environment; and it also requires its relapse into a
reflex suitable to the community. We thus obtain the more flexible
communities of low-grade minds, or even living cells, which possess some
power of adaptation to the chance details of remote environment.
Finally mankind also uses a more artificial symbolism, obtained chiefly
by concentrating on a certain selection of sense-perceptions, such as
words for example. In this case, there is a chain of derivations of
symbol from symbol whereby finally the local relations, between the
final symbol and the ultimate meaning, are entirely lost. Thus these
derivative symbols, obtained as it were by arbitrary association, are
really the results of reflex action suppressing the intermediate
portions of the chain. We may use the word ‘association’ when there is
this suppression of intermediate links.
This derivative symbolism, employed by mankind, is not in general mere
indication of meaning, in which every common feature shared by symbol
and meaning has been lost. In every effective symbolism there are
certain Æsthetic features shared in common. The meaning acquires emotion
and feeling directly excited by the symbol. This is the whole basis of
the art of literature, namely that emotions and feelings directly
excited by the words should fitly intensify our emotions and feelings
arising from contemplation of the meaning. Further in language there is
a certain vagueness of symbolism. A word has a symbolic association with
its own history, its other meanings, and with its general status in
current literature. Thus a word gathers emotional signification from its
emotional history in the past; and this is transferred symbolically to
its meaning in present use.
The same principle holds for all the more artificial sorts of human
symbolism:—for example, in religious art. Music is particularly adapted
for this symbolic transfer of emotions, by reason of the strong emotions
which it generates on its own account. These strong emotions at once
overpower any sense that its own local relations are of any importance.
The only importance of the local arrangement of an orchestra is to
enable us to hear the music. We do not listen to the music in order to
gain a just appreciation of how the orchestra is situated. When we hear
the hoot of a motor car, exactly the converse situation arises. Our only
interest in the hoot is to determine a definite locality as the seat of
causal efficacy determining the future.
This consideration of the symbolic transference of emotion raises
another question. In the case of sense-perception, we may ask whether
the Æsthetic emotion associated with it is derivative from it or merely
concurrent with it. For example, the sound waves by their causal
efficacy may produce in the body a state of pleasurable Æsthetic
emotion, which is then symbolically transferred to the sense-perception
of the sounds. In the case of music, having regard to the fact that deaf
people do not enjoy music, it seems that the emotion is almost entirely
the product of the musical sounds. But the human body is causally
affected by the ultra-violet rays of the solar spectrum in ways which do
not issue in any sensation of colour. Nevertheless such rays produce a
decided emotional effect. Also even sounds, just below or just above the
limit of audibility, seem to add an emotional tinge to a volume of
audible sound. This whole question of the symbolic transfer of emotion
lies at the base of any theory of the Æsthetics of art. For example, it
gives the reason for the importance of a rigid suppression of irrelevant
detail. For emotions inhibit each other, or intensify each other.
Harmonious emotion means a complex of emotions mutually intensifying;
whereas the irrelevant details supply emotions which, because of their
irrelevance, inhibit the main effect. Each little emotion directly
arising out of some subordinate detail refuses to accept its status as a
detached fact in our consciousness. It insists on its symbolic transfer
to the unity of the main effect.
Thus symbolism, including the symbolic transference by which it is
effected, is merely one exemplification of the fact that a unity of
experience arises out of the confluence of many components. This unity
of experience is complex, so as to be capable of analysis. The
components of experience are not a structureless collection
indiscriminately brought together. Each component by its very nature
stands in a certain potential scheme of relationships to the other
components. It is the transformation of this potentiality into real
unity which constitutes that actual concrete fact which is an act of
experience. But in transformation from potentiality to actual fact
inhibitions, intensifications, directions of attention toward,
directions of attention away from, emotional outcomes, purposes, and
other elements of experience may arise. Such elements are also true
components of the act of experience; but they are not necessarily
determined by the primitive phases of experience from which the final
product arises. An act of experience is what a complex organism comes
to, in its character of being one thing. Also its various parts, its
molecules, and its living cells, as they pass on to new occasions of
their existence, take a new colour from the fact that in their immediate
past they have been contributory elements to this dominant unity of
experience, which in its turn reacts upon them.
Thus mankind by means of its elaborate system of symbolic transference
can achieve miracles of sensitiveness to a distant environment, and to a
problematic future. But it pays the penalty, by reason of the dangerous
fact that each symbolic transference may involve an arbitrary imputation
of unsuitable characters. It is not true, that the mere workings of
nature in any particular organism are in all respects favorable either
to the existence of that organism, or to its happiness, or to the
progress of the society in which the organism finds itself. The
melancholy experience of men makes this warning a platitude. No
elaborate community of elaborate organisms could exist unless its
systems of symbolism were in general successful. Codes, rules of
behaviour, canons of art, are attempts to impose systematic action which
on the whole will promote favourable symbolic interconnections. As a
community changes, all such rules and canons require revision in the
light of reason. The object to be obtained has two aspects; one is the
subordination of the community to the individuals composing it, and the
other is the subordination of the individuals to the community. Free men
obey the rules which they themselves have made. Such rules will be found
in general to impose on society behaviour in reference to a symbolism
which is taken to refer to the ultimate purposes for which the society
exists.
It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major
advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies
in which they occur:—like unto an arrow in the hand of a child. The art
of free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code;
and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code serves
those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason. Those societies
which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of
revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow
atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows.
● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
○ Footnotes have been moved to follow the chapters in which they are
referenced.