exercise. Society needs these too. We, in social relation as social
beings, need the social nourishment, rest, and exercise. Social
nourishment comes through contact with the world’s supplies, permanent
and current. We need to “stock up” in our common heritage of
information, of beauty and use and power. Whatever we need which lower
animals do not need is social nourishment. The desire to know of the
healthy young mind, the desire to travel, the desire to see people,
these are forms of our undying hunger for that which belongs to us as
human beings. When all of us, from our youth up, are put in easy
connection with the unlimited supplies of Society, we shall all be
socially nourished. Observe that these things _are not consumed_ while
they nourish, but remain continually refreshing as many as can partake
of them. Every member of Society should have free access to all social
products: art, music, literature, facilities of travel, and education;
and would so absorb his preferred nourishment as unerringly as do the
cells of the body from the whirling profusion offered by the blood.
Social rest is another imperative need of human beings, in proportion to
their humanness. The more highly specialised and intense the service of
the individual the more he needs to break off the connection and rest;
rest from being social; go back and be animal awhile; find in pure ease
and relaxation, in irrelative physical exercise, and in the beautiful
family relation (one of the safest and loveliest life-forms sheltered by
society), that complete rest which will enable him to return to his
social relation with renewed vigour.
Vacations of all sorts—the country home, the hunting trip—tell of this
need, and the nervous collapse of highly socialised types when denied it
is a common occurrence. Simple and primitive trades, if not excessive in
hours of labour, are far less exhausting. Breathing goes on
continuously, digesting with regular frequency, but thinking has to
rest. A healthy social life will allow for the natural periods of rest
for all its members.
Social exercise is but the use of our best and highest faculties to the
largest end. A Gladstone confined to directing envelopes would not be
exercising his social faculties to their full extent. Napoleon as a
_chauffeur_ might have killed quite a number of people, but would not
have been really satisfied. Exercise is life’s first law, and full
exercise is required for full development.
This is where in our imperfect degree of socialisation we suffer most,
for lack of this full use of our social powers, especially women. We are
frequently overworked as individuals while underworked socially, another
condition accounting for morbid, nervous states. A man with capacity for
managing a high-grade department store would lack exercise to a most
injurious degree if he were kept as a country grocer’s clerk, though he
might ruin his eyes with bookkeeping and his back with lifting barrels.
The full use of our largest faculties in the largest relation—that is
social exercise.
Another thing which prevents us from recognising the nature of Society
is our almost unavoidable mental limitation to the perception of the
stage of development represented by the animal organism.
“If Society is an organism,” we say, “where are its feet and hands, its
eyes, nose, and mouth? Where is its skin? Where does it begin and leave
off?” And not seeing any large beast stuffed with persons like the
Trojan horse, or some vast man-filled man like the wicker-built
sacrificial cage of the Druids, we deny the existence of the alleged
organism.
Organic life is not limited to existing forms. As it has developed so
far, it has been in the line of increasing freedom and fluency of
relation. The constituent cells of vegetable matter are held together
less rigidly than in the pre-organic mineral formation. In animal matter
the relation is more fluent yet. And in social matter, so to speak, it
is yet more free and movable. Yet, if you look down upon the earth as
one with some vast microscope studying the life of mould, or monads, you
will find that the human particles are connected inexorably. Remember
that even in minerals—if you can see largely enough—the atoms whirl
alone. They are held in relation by laws of attraction and repulsion,
and that relation is close enough to form to our senses a solid body.
Human beings are not webbed together like frogs’ eggs, but they are held
together in definite relation by laws of attraction and repulsion, like
the constituents of any other material body. The stuff that Society is
made of is thickest in great cities, and as it develops these dense and
throbbing social ganglia grow and grow. In wide, rural areas the stuff
is thin—very thin. But watch the lines of connection form and grow, ever
thicker and faster as the Society progresses. The trail, the path, the
road, the railroad, the telegraph wire, the trolley car; from monthly
journeys to remote post-offices to the daily rural delivery; thus
Society is held together. Save for the wilful hermit losing himself in
the wilderness, every man has his lines of connection with the others;
the psychic connection, such as “family ties,” “the bonds of affection,”
and physical connection in the path from his doorstep to the Capital
city.
The social organism does not walk about on legs. It spreads and flows
over the surface of the earth, its members walking in apparent freedom,
yet bound indissolubly together and thrilling in response to social
stimulus and impulse.
Before Society grew at all we were but human animals, maintaining and
reproducing ourselves like any other animals, but with no _connection_,
no common life. They were of no faintest use to one another, but quite
the contrary, being legitimate competitors for a free supply, and so
naturally hating and destroying one another. As Society grows the
connection between its members grows and thickens and differentiates.
Men are of increasing use to one another, no longer competitors in any
legitimate sense, but combiners in common production and distribution,
and so naturally helping and loving one another. Those who still compete
and destroy are but survivals from the earlier period, mischievous
relics and back-numbers. All Social evolution is the story of the
development and improvement of the connective tissues of Society, from
language, the great psychic medium, to steel rail and wire, the
infinitely multiplying physical medium. This connection and interaction
of the human animals is the most conspicuous fact about them, and that
connection is by every test organic.
Another and similar reason for our denial of the social organism is the
fact of the temporary detachableness of the individual human being. Men
visibly walk about on their own feet, going apparently where they will,
and no examination discloses a Siamese band between one man and his
brother man. So when the sociologist says there is no such thing as a
separate human creature,—that a solitary human creature is a
contradiction in terms,—the average individualist replies, “See Robinson
Crusoe!” This answer shows great lack of biological knowledge. The
splendid growth of education in our day, which is beginning to teach our
children dynamics as well as statics, laws as well as facts, will soon
remove this ignorance.
If I say, “There is no such thing as a tree without roots,” it might be
replied, “But there is! See my Christmas tree?” Yes, it is there for a
little, but it is not really a tree, it is timber; it cannot last, nor
grow, nor reproduce its kind.
I may say, “There is no such thing as a man without a head,” and someone
reply, “But there is! See this gentleman on the dissecting table and his
head on the tray yonder.” That is not a man, it is a corpse. I may say,
“There is no such thing as a finger without a hand,” and it be replied,
“See this one here in alcohol!” That again is not a finger, it is but a
corpse. If you join a severed finger quickly enough, it will grow on
again. If you return a severed man to his society soon enough, he will
grow on again. So in this perfectly true statement, “There is no such
thing as a solitary human creature; it is a contradiction in terms”; the
presentation of a man on an island or in a prison cell is no answer.
Though cut off like the finger, he does not instantly deliquesce and
disappear. His connection with the society which evolved him being
severed, he may continue to live as an animal, but is in process of
decay as a human being; he is an ex-man. Our connection is so subtle, so
fluent, each human brain being so large a storage battery of social
energy, that we can separate for a time with no loss. But make the
separation complete and the humanness dies.
We have been deterred also from seeing the larger and more vital human
relation by the smaller and more arbitrary. Perhaps the most conspicuous
of these is the Family, often called the Unit of the State.
Now the family is not a distinctively human relation at all; many
varieties of animals, especially among the higher carnivora, have
families, with monogamic union, too, where devoted parents strive and
suffer to provide for and protect their young. A perfectly normal and
necessary group is the family, and one proved best for successful
reproduction of the species, but not a social unit at all. The
individual is the social unit, combining to develop the structure and
functions of Society.
Families never combine, they can’t. Families take no part in social
relation. Each family has its own structure and functions, its own
interests, its own purposes, and these are frequently in direct
opposition to the social good. Just as Society offers a surer, safer,
higher life to the individual, and thus makes possible that inordinate
egoism which is so serious a danger; so it gives the same opportunity to
the family and allows of a wider, deeper, and more intense familism than
is possible among sub-social animals.
It is most interesting to watch the slow struggle of the true social
relation to establish and extend itself against these natural obstacles,
as in the successive overthrow of Patriarchism and Feudalism by the
State. The City as a social group has much easier recognition with us
than larger entities. Civic consciousness began early and found its
splendid flower and fruit, as well as its iron limitations, in Greece.
National consciousness is now quite well established, having the same
advantages and disadvantages as the Civic, only on larger scale. To-day
we are beginning to feel the largest consciousness of all, the truly
Human, in whose unbounded growth and beautifully progressive development
the petty limitations of all earlier forms are slowly disappearing.
“What are your national distinctions?” an inquiring Englishman asked me.
“The time is past for national distinctions,” I replied. “The time is
coming for the people of the world, and Americans are the first of
them.”
Then, too, we have been so occupied in the specific local function of
Society as to miss that general grouping and balancing which made them
all possible. Take that vast and varying social function the
Church,—organised religion,—appearing very early in the dominance of
savage priestcraft, finding its height in the resistless Hierarchies of
Egypt and Palestine, and struggling ever since to hold its failing sway.
Take the Army, another very early, very strong, and very hard-dying
social form. It is still with us, brilliant and loud, an increasing evil
in the fast-growing industrial life of to-day. See the Soldier scorning
the Merchant in the Middle Ages. See the Merchant directing the Soldier
to-day. His time of pre-eminence is past.
So in course of social evolution one and another organic group has been
developed, each tending to excess by the law of inertia (and social
inertia is the most long-winded we know), yet all inevitably sinking
into place in the smooth, complex interaction toward which we are
moving. Men, specialised to the social service, in their several lines,
yet knowing not what they served, have limited their enthusiasm to their
specialty, and striven to make the Church, the Army, the Law, Art, or
what they call Business, their supreme end.
The real social organism includes them all, and relates them all in
order of importance. This order of importance may as well be laid down
here, as quite essential to an understanding of the nature of Society.
The standard of measurement used is that of evolution, “lower” or
“higher” being marked in that line of progress which leads always from
the less to the greater, from the simple to the complex. Relative
importance may perhaps be measured downwards: a stomach is more
important than an eye, because you cannot live without it. But the eye
is “higher” than the stomach, a later developed and more specialised
organ.
So in social evolution agriculture is more important than literature,
because we cannot live without it; but literature is higher than
agriculture as being later developed and more highly specialised. The
social organism has followed in its evolution the same path as earlier
life-forms, developing first the simpler and more immediately vital
processes, and later those more delicate and finer organs which are
needed to fulfil the uses of its progressive life. And as, in physical
evolution, we find now one and now another function of dominant
importance to the creature, so in social evolution we can trace the
varying value of social functions, the military and religious processes
of early societies gradually giving way in importance to the industrial
and educational processes of our own times.
Most valuable of all, to our so long religiously moulded minds, is the
effect of this recognition of the nature of society upon Ethics. Vague
indeed, complicated, mystical, difficult to understand, have been our
gropings after this great science. Ethics is the Science of Social
Relation; it could never be understood by individualists.
There is no ethics for an individual except to maintain, improve, and
reproduce himself. A consistent and remorseless egoism is right for the
individual animal; through it he fulfils the law of his being; through
it he improves his race. So we, wishing to improve a breed of cattle,
consistently and remorselessly select and train and breed from preferred
individuals, neglecting or destroying the inferior ones. So do mistaken
men, not appreciating the nature of society, urge a similar stern
stirpiculture upon us, and would have us neglect or destroy our
defective members and breed only from the best.
But when we have a social animal to deal with, as the bee, different
laws operate, or, rather, the same laws on a larger scale, a higher
plane. It is the best swarm now to be selected; and the value of the
swarm depends not so much upon the size and vigour of its individual
constituents as on _how they work together_. There is ethics in a hive,
laws of collective behaviour. There is ethics in Society, because it is
a collective unit.
Ethics, to Society, is what physics is to matter; ethics is the physics
of social relation. Physical law holds material constituents together in
those combinations and relations which make the material bodies we know.
Ethical law holds social constituents together in those relations which
make the social bodies we know.
But we, not knowing the social body, could not know its laws. We have
striven in vain to predicate ethics of individuals. You “ought” to do
so? Why “ought” I? Because it is “right.” What is “right”? Whatever God
said. And what did God say? What these ancient gentlemen have written in
their ancient times. And if I do not believe what the ancient gentlemen
wrote? There is no answer to this except the somewhat fatuous one of “so
much the worse for you!”
The writings of the ancient gentlemen were not susceptible of proof.
Then came Christ, talking sense. He grasped the nature of Society and
preached its laws. Ye are all members of one body and of one another.
You shall love your neighbour as yourself; that is, recognise him as
really part of what you are part of—all one self; and the love of self
becomes mutual love as we see what Self is to a Human Creature—Our Self.
Christ saw and said all this, and did it, which is more; lived,—as far
as one individual could,—true to his social relation, faithfully
fulfilling his function to that great living thing, though its
immediately surrounding constituents very naturally killed him.
That great Christian concept of mutual love and service is good ethics;
it is scientific; its truth and value can be proved; it works. Had we
grasped and applied it a good many painful centuries might have been
saved us.
But we, our minds still darkened by the beast-concept of Egoism, trying
to personally own the human soul and save our piece to all eternity
without caring what became of the rest of it; we, with our personal God
and his personal Son, and our personal damnation or salvation to
consider, have very generally ignored the theory and practice of Christ,
and made of him merely an article of faith by which to maintain our
precious Egos forever and ever. And this in the face of his “Whoso
saveth his life shall lose it; but whoso loseth his life for my sake
[man’s sake, the sake of the whole] shall find it!”
When we realise the nature of society we shall come nearer to
understanding the teachings of Christ than we have done in twenty
centuries of sublimated self-seeking. In recognising it we rise at one
step from the dark and narrow limits of the personal life, that poor
animal existence, with its common animal wants and their fulfilment;
with its animal loves and hates, hoped and fears, pains and pleasures;
with its brief period of animal life, cut up into changeful patches of
infancy, childhood, youth, maturity, and age, and take our true place in
social life, which is immortal. Whether it dies off the earth in a
million years or so we do not know yet; since it was born it has not
died, but grown and grown continually. This wide, rich, glowing field of
consciousness includes the animal life and maintains it in a higher and
better condition than ever before, but its real distinctive range of
feeling is far beyond that.
All noble and beautiful emotions we call “Human” are social and
immortal. All the distinguishing abilities, the power and skill and
ingenuity that we call “Human,” are social and immortal. “I” am born,
grow up, and die. “I” am a transient piece of meat, enjoying food and
sleep and mating, hunting and fighting.
But “We” are more than that. We together constitute another “I,” which
is Human Life. That was born gradually, many long ages back, and is now
slowly growing up. In that human life, that common, mutual, social life,
are all things that make us human. When we enter consciously into that
great life we are indeed immortal, “saved,” indeed, from primeval
limitations of the animal ego.
VII: THE SOCIAL SOUL
_Summary_
_Our “common sensorium” the “human heart.” All human feelings common.
Action and reaction between body and spirit. Cat and Sheep. Mob spirit,
civic spirit, etc. Effect of institutions. Effect of industries.
Confusion from Ego Concept. Prominence of painful processes. Widening
social consciousness. Collective pleasure greatest. Team-work. Effect of
position of women. Sex combat in industry. Altruism and Omniism. “Self”
an extensible term. Organic relation. Progressive injury of egoism.
Effect of special industries on altruism. Sailor, farmer, miner.
Household labour. Men more altruistic than women. Religion has not
understood altruism, which is a natural social instinct. Man with tail.
Nature of “charity,” transfusion of blood. Selfishness and socialness.
My soul, our soul. Social needs. Inefficiency of personal gratification.
Longitudinal extension of the soul’s life not satisfactory. Must widen
our life, our soul. The Social Passion. Names do not affect facts.
Social life evolves social love. Social instinct in duty, in work.
Social ascetics. Human nature Social nature._
VII
THE SOCIAL SOUL
Some deny the organic concept of society on the ground that we human
beings have no “common sensorium.” But we have. The most conspicuous and
distinctive fact in our psychology is precisely that common sensorium.
We call it in ordinary speech “the human heart,” or “the human spirit,”
or “soul,” and quite correctly. It is human, and “human” is “social”; it
is the social soul.
The individual feels it, inasmuch as the brain, our medium of sensation,
is lodged in an individual head; but what he feels is a common feeling,
not a personal one. He has of course his purely individual range of
sensations, emotions, promptings to action; but these are felt also by
any other animal, they are not “human.”
All our distinctive human feelings are in common, are transmissible,
belong to us collectively, not individually. So markedly true is this
that we have labelled our most visibly collective feelings “humane.”
Common feeling is human feeling, and that great sum of higher
consciousness we call the soul is the human soul.
Psychological terms are all vague and slippery to handle; but we can
clearly observe in any living thing these two departments—the spirit and
the body. While they are together the thing lives, works, goes; when
divided the body gradually disintegrates.
We observe, too, that once a specific allotment of spirit makes to
itself such and such a form, that the form continually reacts upon the
spirit and modifies it. Each animal as we know it has a spirit exactly
suited to his body, evidently the result of long lodgment in it. The
sheep has a spirit suited to his body, the cat has a spirit suited to
his body. Each can do what he wants to and wants to do what he can.
If we can imagine the two transformed and trans-spirited,—the spirit of
a cat in the body of a sheep and the spirit of a sheep in the body of a
cat,—it is plain to see how grievous would be the condition of that
beast. It would want to do what it could not, and could not do what it
wanted to. Spirit must fit body, or body fit spirit, or the two disband
and that creature is dead.
This relation holds in the life of Society; but as that life is large,
complex, enduring, and comprises within it not only the lives of its
constituent individuals, but the lives of its constituent institutions,
the facts are not so easy to follow. Taken historically it may be
observed thus: from the small, early social forms of the tribe and its
villages up to the nation and its cities we see this relation of body
and spirit. “A body of men” of any kind that lives, _i. e._, works, must
have a common spirit or it cannot so live and work.
The loosest mob must have some transient but compelling spirit to hold
it together, else no mob. The smallest village has its common spirit;
and the largest city—the largest nation—must have its common spirit, to
live, to grow, to work. We are familiar with some terms of these facts;
we know, appreciate, and condemn the absence of “the civic spirit.” We
admire and reward “public spirit.” We _have_ to deal with the facts of
Society’s organic life, even while those graveyard brains of ours are
still crowded with the monuments of dead concepts.
In popular literature and oratory we freely handle such terms as
“animated by a common spirit,” “the national spirit,” the “spirit of our
institutions,” “_l’esprit de corps_”; but we have not set our minds to
work to grasp and relate these terms in their full meaning. We are
familiar also with the reactive modification of social forms on the
social spirit; seeing men of all characters enter some definite
institution and come out all more or less altered to one distinctive
character, the academic, the military, or whatever; and to us the
largest, newest, most gratifying proof of this is the effect of our
American institutions on the people of all nations. In organising this
nation we embodied the best spirit of the time in a certain form of
government and invited all men to come and enter the new national body.
They did, and a more marked and rapid modification of spirit by form
history has never shown. Come from wheresoever they may, their children
enter our educational, their parents our industrial and political
institutions; and they forthwith become Americans, manifesting our
virtues—and our faults—with startling rapidity. The effect is strongest
on the young and composite races, and weakest on the older established
stocks, as the Chinese and Hebrew, but it is perceptible in all.
In smaller instance we all know the effect of a given school or college
on those entering it,—either teacher or learner, but especially the
learner, as more young and impressible,—as shown in “the Harvard
spirit,” or that of Oxford, or of Yale. When fighting was the dominant
activity we had the natural growth of fighting bodies, elaborately
organised, and of a common fighting spirit which completely overmasters
the individual spirit of its constituents. If specific religious
practices are pursued we have the appearance of a religious body and its
accompanying spirit.