itself. The Socio, the social consciousness, desires for us, for
ourself, and strives for society. But we, feeling this larger desire and
impulse, think it is the Ego still at work, and speak of the colossal
“Selfishness” of man. It is not Selfishness—it is Socialness; and he,
not knowing what it is, tries to satisfy it by satisfying himself.
The futile attempts of a modern man trying to be selfish would be funny
if the effects were not so dangerous. Here he is, with this enormous
area of social consciousness, this enormous stock of social energy, this
enormous field of social activity, all lodged in the executive machine
of one small biped animal.
He is awed and impressed by the vast currents of feeling that sweep
through the social consciousness. “Dear me!” he says; “what a great
mysterious thing is my soul!” It would be mysterious, indeed, if John
Smith had a soul of that size. He feels the irresistible pressure of the
social energy. “Ah!” he says; “how strong I am!” He launches out into
the social activities, doing, it may be, his full share of social
service, but _thinking_ that he is doing it himself, for himself.
And then—poor hungry tortured soul—he tries to satisfy the social
demands he feels by gratifying his own personal desires. The capacity
for personal enjoyment is extremely limited, and mainly physical.
Warmth, quiet, cleanliness, food, rest, physical exercise, and the joys
of mating and rearing young; these the ego wants, and every ego ought to
be guaranteed their full gratification. They cost little, they were long
ago well within the assets of every civilised society. But a society
wants more. All our higher needs are social. “We” want them, and we
shall never be satisfied till “we” have them—all of us.
Suppose the inhabitants of a certain city need more rest, or recreation,
or entertainments, or better facilities of communication. The individual
citizen feels the wants of the city. He cannot satisfy that want in
himself till the city is satisfied. The misguided self-styled egoist,
feeling the social needs, tries to quench the demand by gratifying
himself. He soon reaches personal satiety—_and is still unsatisfied_. Of
course. Here is another of the alleged “enigmas” of human life cleared
up.
Q. Why is man so inordinately selfish?
A. He isn’t. He is social-ish and doesn’t know it.
Q. Why is man never satisfied in spite of all he gets?
A. Because he hasn’t found his mouth yet. He is hungry for a thousand,
and tries to give a thousand dinners to himself to quench that hunger.
When humanity sees its own governing spirit, recognises its own
consciousness as a common consciousness, and goes practically to work to
meet its common needs, the human soul will find peace. It will not stop
growing, but it will become healthy, and grow right. The upward reach of
the human soul will carry always its unfulfilled aspirations, but that
is but an open road, a glorious ever-spreading opportunity; the way of
life; a very different thing from the wailings and convulsions of a
crippled and imprisoned soul, struggling for air—for food—for room to
grow.
Each human being represents humanity. Each has within him as much of the
human soul as he can feel and express, and if he increases his
expression he will feel more. But to call that great Social Spirit
“mine”; to try to explain it by any sort of self-bound theory; to try to
exercise or gratify it within the limits of the individual life—is
almost too absurd for illustration. Some private pipe connecting with
the ocean, and the owner of the pipe prating of “the mystery of ‘my’
tides,” is a possible simile.
The pressure of the great thing has been so beyond our visible ego that
we have been forced to account for it by the hypothesis of personal
immortality. There was evidently no room for the soul—no explanation of
the soul—in one human life as we saw it before us. “But,” said we, “if
we make a human life _long enough_ there will be room for the soul! That
will give us time to understand it, and to gratify these quenchless
aspirations, these boundless desires.”
It did not occur to us that if we made it _wide enough_ it would have
the same effect. Our illimitable egoism, being unable to satisfy its own
demands by any earthly means, has postulated an eternal ego, with whole
ranges of planetary systems to feed in, and hopes, in course of
eternity, time not being enough, to satisfy Itself!
And so, postponing the problems it could not answer to a conveniently
extensive after life; and considering its own agonies and contortions in
this life as part and parcel of the great game between God and the
Devil; it has struggled and suffered on; pushed relentlessly upward by
the organic social forces, held down most cruelly by its self-made bands
of iron; the rigid clamps of primitive ignorance renewed from generation
to generation, in spite of the increasing agony of the growing soul.
No wonder we are more unhappy than we used to be; we are bigger, much
bigger, but the ego hasn’t grown at all. The social spirit of a small
young society could masquerade as an ego without too painful
inconvenience; but the social spirit of the world to-day is so vast, so
strong, so much nearer to expression in our more developed minds, so
much more commonly felt, owing to our more equal education, that its
confinement to an ego is too agonising to endure,—it is simply
impossible.
Therefore we see the steady growth of “public spirit,”—“civic feeling,”
national and international movements toward general improvement; more
and more individuals, rich and poor, devoting themselves to social
service; the growing objection to war; the tendency to distribute as
well as to accumulate millions; the development of “the home church”;
and even—most hopeful of all these splendid signs of life—even the
rising current of organisation among women.
This Ego hypothesis might as well be laid aside at once and forever. We
are not separate creatures at all, our life is ours, and only so to be
rightly lived. It is so easy,—leaving off the ego-theory,—to observe the
natural growth of the social spirit in its ever-broadening, steady
pressure and in those bursts of irresistible energy we call passion.
Any intense human feeling we call a passion, using the word to
distinguish certain main lines of feeling common to us all, as “the
maternal passion,” “the tender passion,” and those broad divisions Hate,
Fear, Envy, Remorse, Ambition, Grief, Revenge. Also some special gust of
intensity in minor lines of feeling is distinguished by the same word,
“a passion of gratitude,” “a passion of loneliness,” “a passion of
rebellion,” or of avarice.
Our words climb slowly along the facts, changing as our perception
changes, and always behind. Heat as a fact we observed and used long
before we knew what to call it, if, indeed, what we call it now is any
more true than it was before. But, whether “a fluid” named Caloric, or
“a force” named Heat, the fact which we all know and use remains the
same. It did its work in the world as fully before we came as after;
before we named it at all as after. But to us, to our consciousness, the
thing does not exist until we see it, and, seeing, name.
“The maternal passion” is as strong a force in mother-wasp and
mother-whale as in the most sophisticated and analytic mother-human.
These passions are simply accumulations of stored energy along certain
much-used lines, and serve to keep up a steady flow of the desired
energy when there is no immediate stimulus to call for it. In the
maternal passion, for instance, long ages of iron experience have
developed a certain average of watchfulness and care even when the young
are visibly safe, and a surprising fund of power and fury in defence of
the young even when the exciting cause is comparatively small. It keeps
up a safer average of care and defence than if the feeling were merely
reactionary, and has therefore been developed in surviving species.
Society, the vast and varied organism in which we live, calls for a
devotion more single and fearless than that even of the mother; for a
steady average of service and a sudden fund of fury in defence, a love
and care and courage higher than any heretofore required; and as it
needs such a feeling it gets it. Those societies having it most highly
developed survive. We have called it many names; let us now give it
another, the Social Passion.
We are most familiar with its branches, minor and local, and with its
blazing heights of expression; but the governing line of feeling is as
simple as the animal mother’s. She, for the sake of race-preservation,
must feed and guard and teach the young, therefore she manifests the
maternal passion. We, for the sake of race-preservation, must feed and
guard and teach each other, therefore we manifest the social passion.
One common form is what we call “the sense of duty.” A single animal has
no “duty,” he acts and reacts under direct stimuli, and so in large
measure does the savage. But social maintenance requires a steady
service without immediate and apparent cause; an even standard of merit
in the work done; a reliability in the fulfilment of the allotted task,
and, at times, a tremendous fervour of exertion and heroism. The
“feeling” in us which urges to these acts is as deep and unreasonable as
any other “feeling”; it is a genuine passion.
The irritation of a mother at any criticism of her child, however
plainly merited, is perfectly paralleled by the irritation of the
citizen at any criticism of his country. The instant rush to the rescue
of an injured “fellow creature,” co-creature, member of the same great
body, is as blind and instinctive as the mother’s rush to save the
child. It finds its most familiar and acute form in the soldier “dying
for his country.” Devotion to “a cause” of any sort, a class, a club, a
corps, a union, the intense “co-ability” of the human creature, this is
but manifestation of the social passion.
The hero, the statesman, the patriot, the public saviour and servant of
any sort are conspicuous examples of this feeling at its height; the
reformer and religious leader, from the most mistaken enthusiasts to the
greatest prophets and teachers, are all exponents of this mightiest of
forces, the social passion. A blind, deep, instinctive pressure, a
_must_ in the very blood, a feeling bred of centuries of social contact
and interdependence, this is what kindles the great hearts who live or
die to serve the world.
Where it touches the present subject is in its relation to Work, of
which indeed it is the immediate conscious cause.
The maternal passion does not manifest itself merely in bursts of wild
self-sacrifice, but speaks plainest in the patient, steady labour with
which it serves the young. So the social passion, while most conspicuous
in Horatius at the bridge, is as valuable in the engineer at the lever,
or the steersman at the helm.
The Love of Work is one great manifestation of the Social Passion. The
maternal function urging to expression, this gives the rich joy of
nursing one’s child, and that almost inconceivable torment of the black
past where the starving baby cried before the chained mother’s bursting
breasts. The social function urging to expression, this gives the rich
joy of work accomplished and the aching, quenchless misery of work
denied. Fulfilment of function, that is Work, and, forbidden, the poor
functionary aches like a tied leg.
We may trace this suffering from work denied through all the uneasy
contortions of “the leisure class” to the final surrender to that social
paralysis, _ennui_. Healthy physical impulses, checked in natural
expression, twitch and cramp the unused member. Healthy social impulses,
checked in natural expression, twitch and cramp in similar agony and
distortion. Always the impulse to do—the human instinct, the social
passion. Then the inhibition from mistaken theories and false ideas, the
individual checking his healthy social impulses as perversely as the
religious ascetic checks his healthy physical impulses.
And as the ascetic, bottling his life up, froths off in wild visions and
fanatical activity, so the social ascetic lives in a whirling rush of
useless exertion and excitement, always seeking in what he calls
“society” that true social contact and social action which he never
finds. And as the body of the ascetic wastes and dwarfs and deforms
under the unnatural life his gross delusions bring him to, so does
society suffer under the diseased conditions engendered by this fatuous
mistake.
More firmly and reassuringly we can trace the social passion in its true
expression. Clear and strong it has left its mark on every age, and
rises steadily with our rising socialisation. The co-consciousness with
its beautiful result in love; “a fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind”;
“one touch of nature makes the whole world kin”; the co-activity and its
resultant virtues and abilities; the need for expression of those
“co-abilities”; the urge toward exertion, ultimately seen to be in the
social interest, but pushing from within as a passion; this feeling it
is which made Palissy the Potter break up his furniture to insure his
glaze; which drove Galileo to his studies in defiance of the Church;
which fed the fire with prohibited books and gave up martyrs by the
score to die because they would let out what was in them; they must.
We see it clearest in the arts and sciences, in the inventor, the
explorer, the teacher of new truth. But what drives these conspicuously
specialised social servants to their work is the same force which holds
the steersman to his wheel, the engineer to his lever, the sentry to his
post: the power of functional expression; stronger in us than any other
force, as our social nature is stronger in us than the nature of the
beast.
If we would recognise our “human nature” to be our “social nature,” and
that what we have so scorned and pitied as “poor human nature” is not
human at all, but merely animal,—ego-nature,—it would alter our whole
range of thought on this vital matter.
The social spirit is not “poor,” but bounteously rich and strong. It
rises grandly to meet great emergencies, but is felt most continually in
our impulse to work, to do what we are made for, what we are together
for; that which constitutes the primal condition and line of development
for human life.
VIII: THE SOCIAL BODY
_Summary_
_Likeness between spirit and form, mutual modification. Love modified by
form. The soul human. The body of society our manufactured things. Bones
of dead societies. The thing made. Animal’s things all grow on him.
Society secretes its material form. The thing marks the age. Axe-man,
swords-man, pen-man, etc. Value of detachability of tools. Potentiality
of human body. Value of exchangeability of tools. Vehicle of common use.
Reaction of thing made on user. Body a machine we have to learn. Thing
promotes further action. Growth in work. Cloth. Effect on life. Value
and effect of machines. Pleasure of transmitting energy. Mistaken
objection to machinery. Reversion to “hand work” foolish. Social
progress conditioned by mechanical. We are now capable of far better
living and have the means for it. American advance. Machine does for
society what the cerebellum does for the body. Our power to facilitate
social progress. “Truth in art” and “better housing.” Restrictions due
to false concepts, not to conditions._
VIII
THE SOCIAL BODY
We have seen, that in every living creature there is a close and vivid
likeness between its spirit and its form, between body and soul. Given
such a spirit and it tends to evolve such a form. Given such a form and
it tends to evolve such a spirit. The form must limit and modify the
spirit.
Fortunately forms can change; and spirit, to grow, continually discards
old forms and makes new. If anything succeeds in fixing a given form
unchanged, so is the spirit within it imprisoned and checked in growth
forever. It is for this reason doubtless that the primal force has been
so busy making its endless procession of forms. First we have the
universe set whirling with great suns and their spattering planets; then
the planet flames, crackles, cools, crusts over, and so fringes out in
all manner of soft green, and following these we have life cut looser,
freer, in animal forms; lastly the social.
Imagine the sun as loving; it can but shine and glow to express that
love. The dog loves, and can but leap and lick and wag his tail, fetch
and carry, watch and fight to show it. The man loves, and in the
manifold activities made possible by his form, by the special
development of the brain, he can express that principal force more
deeply, widely, fully. The spirit of every living thing is expressed
through its form and limited by it.
Humanity, if a living creature, has a soul and a body. The soul we all
know; we call it rightly the human soul. Where is the body of that soul?
Not in our little bundle of arms and legs—we had that in full career
before the human soul was possible. That is the body of an animal,
capable of expressing as much spirit as any animal, perhaps a little
more than a large ape. If we had no medium of expression but these
physical bodies there could be no Society, no Humanity, and no social
soul.
That last and best expression of creative force finds its material form
in the things we make in the manufactured world. Take from a society its
body, the structure of brick, stone, and iron, wood, cloth, leather,
glass, paper,—all that elaborate compound of materials in which we
live,—reduce it to a mere congregation of naked animals, and what would
ensue? Those animals would either rebuild in desperate haste the
material forms in which alone Society exists, or they would relapse into
individual savagery. If too small a group, or too highly specialised to
reproduce the social body to live in, they would be unable even to
revert to savagery and would simply die. The Social Soul we have seen to
be a common consciousness developed by common activities. The Social
Body is a common material form, also developed by common activities.
Both appear in proportion to the extent and development of those
activities.
As house and vehicle for the spirit of an animal has been slowly evolved
the cunning mechanism of bone and muscle, with all its constituent
organs, in which a man lives. It is but a combination of chemicals and
minerals, and when the soul is out of it they disintegrate and revert to
lower combinations. As house and vehicle for the spirit of society has
been slowly evolved the more cunning and elaborate mechanism of wood and
cloth, brick, stone, metal—in which Humanity lives. It too is but a
combination of chemicals and minerals, and when its inhabiting humanity
is gone, it too disintegrates and reverts, though more slowly. The bones
of dead societies remain to us in stone and glass and pottery, as do the
bones of extinct animals.
An animal life, once started in the germ, goes on growing, _i. e._,
making to itself a body suitable to its soul. If you arrest the growth
of the body,—if, for instance, a baby’s head were cased in iron,—you
would arrest the growth of the soul. It would have one, potentially;
that is, it would if its brain had room for it, but actually you would
have checked it. So the social life, once started, goes on assimilating
material particles and recombining them in mechanical form, enlarging
its functions as it enlarges the structure through which alone they
become possible. Society builds its body for good or ill.
A piece of human creation—a manufactured article—is the record, the
physical manifestation of our humanness. By these things, reading
backward, does the ethnologist reconstruct the vanished races as the
paleontologist reconstructs a vanished beast from fossil bones. A bead,
a knife, a needle, some torque or bracelet, a broken jar,—and the lost
people rise before us.
Man, to be such and such, requires such and such things, and evolves
them as naturally as the sea-beast makes its shell. It grows from him—so
do our manufactures grow from us. Society secretes, as it were, the
manufactured article. We need clothes, for instance, a purely social
need. The individual animal does not need clothes. He carries his
wardrobe on his back. Never a solitary creature in clothes. Clothes are
for other people more than the wearer. Other people are required to make
them. Even in a one-generation-reversion, as of some hunting hermit of
modern times,—back he goes to buckskin! He cannot shear and card, weave
and spin, bleach and dye, cut and sew. Back he goes to borrow some other
animal’s skin; and, if he stayed a hunting hermit for enough
generations, back would he go to his own skin and its natural growth of
hair.
But the increasing social faculties and desires—the love of ornament,
the sense of decency, the need of concealment, the demand for a more
fluent and delicate expression of personality—these call for clothes,
and society evolves them through a thousand trades.
A trade is a social function, and clothing is a social product as hair
is a product of the individual body. In the thing made lies our social
history so fully that, had we a full line of specimens, we should need
no other monument of progress.
The progress of each age rests on its things: the unchipped flint and
the polished; the bronze knife and the steel; the wonder-working wheel
(how much of social progress goes “on wheels”!); the bow and arrow, the
sword, the axe, the spade,—small things for separate use at first,—and
then the marvellous, monster engines of to-day; they are at once the
means and the record of progress. There is a phase of thought which
despises “material things,” and prattles ardently of our “spiritual
nature.” But in steady-marching ages of coincidence man’s spiritual
nature manifests itself through material things, and grows by means of
them. The ships of Tyre made possible that Phœnician civilisation which
has so affected the Grecian and all that follow. The roads of Rome knit
and fastened her Empire to the ends of the earth.
Axe-man, bow-man, swords-man, plough-man, boatman, pen-man,—there is a
steady likeness between man’s things and man. As there is the same
likeness between the spirit and the body of each animal, so man, having
the new, wide, aspiring, endless, social soul, manifests its growth in
ceaseless progression of manufacture, in developing this vast body of
Society. The human soul is greater than the animal’s because it has a
greater body to live in—complex, universal.
One marvellous power that is ours by virtue of these things is that
whereas they do not grow on us personally, we remain somewhat free of
their inexorable reaction.
A beast depending mainly on digging for his livelihood, as the mole, is
relentlessly modified to claws. Paw, arm and shoulder, neck and head,
the body, the fur, the eyes,—he is a digger, and the spirit within him
is a contented digger, too—needs must.
Once in a permanent form the spirit accepts it and stops growing.
Man digs mightily, but spade and pick do not grow on him. He takes them
up, he lays them down; he substitutes the axe, the scythe, the flail.
And so he does not become hopelessly the spade-holder. Too much of one
kind of tool, and we have the “Man with the Hoe.”
With this rich fluency of attach- and detachability we have sped up the
ages of social evolution with an ease and swiftness inconceivable of any
other animal whose machinery is so inalienably attached to his spirit
that it takes slow centuries to change him. This is what gives the
subtle beauty to the human body, its measureless potentiality. Every
other animal’s body is a perfect representation of its blended
activities, greater or less. The hound, the cat, the stag, the horse,
the swan, each speaks to us of its activities, each form is an embodied
motion. But each in its degree is final; being that motion or those
motions, it cannot be others; its personal perfection is its limit.
Man’s body is an almost limitless possibility. He is the handle of
innumerable tools. The upright, balanced trunk leaves the legs free for
all possible movement; the high-hung, wide-reaching arms with branching
fingers are tenfold elephant trunks; he can perform more kinds of
actions than any other creature.