The social life of the present day presents grave and far-reaching
problems. We are confronted by demands for social reconstruction, which
shew that the solution of these problems must be sought along paths
unthought-of hitherto. Borne out by the actual events of the hour, the
time has perhaps come for someone to gain a hearing, who is forced by
life's experience to maintain, that the neglect to turn our thoughts
into the paths that are now needed has stranded us in confusion and
perplexity. It is under that conviction that this book is written. Its
purpose is to discuss what needs doing, in order that those demands,
which are being urged by a large part of mankind to-day, may be turned
in the direction of a determinate social will and purpose.
Personal likes and dislikes should enter but little into the formation
of a social purpose. The demands, welcome or unwelcome, are there;
and they must be reckoned with as facts of social life. This should
be borne in mind by those who, from their personal situation in life,
may be inclined to be annoyed at the author's way of discussing the
demands of the working-class, because in their opinion he lays too
one-sided a stress on these demands, as on something that must be
reckoned with when determining on a social purpose. But what the author
wants, is to present life as it exists to-day in all its full reality,
in so far as he is able from his knowledge of it. He has ever before
his eyes the fatal consequences that must ensue, if people refuse
to see facts, which are actually there, which have arisen out of the
life of modern mankind,--and if they accordingly persist in ignoring
a social will and purpose in which these facts find their place.
Those people again will not be pleased with the author's remarks,
who regard themselves as experts in practical life,--or in what,
under the influence of fond habit, has come to be regarded as
practical life. They will be of opinion, that whoever wrote this
book was not a practical person. These are just the people, who, in
the author's opinion, have everything to unlearn and re-learn. Their
practice of life seems to him the very thing, which is demonstrated
by the actual facts from which mankind are suffering to be an
utter mistake,--that very mistake that has led to boundless and
immeasurable fatalities. These people will be obliged to recognise the
practicability of much that has seemed to them absurd idealism. And
although they may condemn this book at the outset, because its opening
pages say less about the economic than about the spiritual life of
modern mankind, yet the author's own acquaintance with life forces him
to the conviction, that, unless people can bring themselves to pay
due and accurate attention to the spiritual life of modern mankind,
they will only go on adding fresh mistakes to the old ones.
Neither will what is said in these pages altogether please those,
who are for ever repeating with endless variations the phrases: that
man must rise above absorption in purely material interests,--that he
must turn to "ideals," to the things of the "spirit." For the author
does not attach much importance to mere references to the "spirit"
or to talk about a vague spiritual world. The only spirituality he can
acknowledge, is that which forms the substance of man's own life and
manifests its power no less in mastering the practical problems of
life than in constructing a philosophy of life and of the universe,
which can satisfy the needs of man's soul. The important point,
is not the knowledge,--or supposed knowledge,--of a spiritual life,
but that such a spiritual life shews itself in a practical grip of
realities, and is not a special preserve for the inner life of the
soul, a backwater alongside the full tide of realities.
And so, what is said in these pages will seem to the
"spiritually-minded" too unspiritual, to "practical persons" too remote
from practice. But the author's view is, that he may have his own
special use at the present time, for the very reason, that he neither
tends towards that aloofness from life, which is to be found in many a
man who thinks himself practical, nor yet can hold in any way with the
kind of talk about the spirit, which conjures up a mirage out of words.
It is as a question of economics, of human rights and of the spirit,
that the social question is discussed in this book. The author thinks
that he perceives, how the true form of the social question emerges
as an outcome of the requirements of the economic life, the life of
"rights" and the spiritual life. Through such a perception alone can
the impulses come, which shall make it possible to give these three
branches of social life a shape that permits of healthy life within
the social order. In the earlier ages of mankind's evolution, the
social instincts secured these three branches being woven together in
the whole life of society in a manner adapted to human nature at that
period. At the present stage of his evolution, man is faced with the
necessity of working out this combination of function by conscious,
determinate social will and purpose. Between those earlier ages and the
present, in the countries where the question of a social purpose is
most immediate, we find the old instincts and the new consciousness
overlapping and playing through one another in a fashion quite
inadequate to the needs of modern mankind. In a great deal of social
thinking, which people believe to be clear-sighted and conscious,
the old instincts are still at work and enfeeble men's thought for
dealing with urgent facts. It requires a much more radical effort
than is usually supposed, for the man of the present day to work his
way out of the husks of what is dead and done with.
One must first be willing to recognise this fully, before, in the
author's opinion, it is possible to see the forms that industrial
economy, human rights, and spiritual life must take, in order to be in
keeping with a healthy social life such as the new age demands. What
the author feels called on to say as to the lines that these new
forms must inevitably follow, is submitted to the judgment of the
day in the following pages. The author's desire, is to give the first
impetus along a path, that shall lead to social ends in keeping with
the actual realities and exigencies of life at the present time; for he
believes, that it is only through effort thus directed that our social
will and purpose can get beyond mere utopianism and wordy sentiment.
And if anyone still thinks that this book has somewhat of a utopian
character, the author would ask him to consider the pictures which
people draw in their own minds of the kind of society that they look
to see arise,--how very wide of life such pictures are, and how apt
to degenerate into mere moonshine. That is the very reason, why, when
these people do meet with something that is drawn from actual reality
and experience,--as attempted here,--they regard it as a utopia. To
many persons, nothing is "concrete" outside their own customary line
of thought; and so the concrete itself is to them an abstraction,
when they are unaccustomed to think it. [1]--Hence they will think
this book abstract.
With people again, whose minds are harnessed hard and fast to a
party-programme, the author's views will at first find no favour. Of
this he is well aware. Still he believes, that it will not be long
before many party men come to the conclusion, that the actual facts of
evolution have got far beyond the programmes of the parties, and that
it is urgently necessary to free oneself from all such party-programmes
and to form an independent opinion as to the immediate objectives of
the social will and purpose.