Part 42

In sociology as in biology function produces organism, that is to say, activity produces the organ or faculty fitted to perform the activity. The psychic characteristics differentiating social groups are chiefly, and perhaps exclusively, due to diverse social activities. These activities are determined by innumerable causes, geographical, climatic, economic, political, intellectual, emotional, and personal.

The plasticity of a psychic group is due to the plasticity of the infant mind and brain, which is wonderfully capable of acquiring the language, thought forms, and differentiating characteristics of any group in which it may be reared. To what extent this plasticity extends only carefully conducted experiments can show. In the higher Asiatic and European races we find it to be much greater than is generally supposed to be the case, but it is not improbable that the lowest races possess it in a much lower degree.

The relative fixity of a psychic group is due to the fact that in full-grown adults, who form the majority of every group, function has produced structure. Body, brain, and mind have "set" or crystallized in the mold provided by the social order. Influences sufficiently powerful to transform the young have little effect on the adult. The relative fixity of a psychic group is also due to the difficulty--well-nigh impossibility--of bringing new psychic influences to bear on all members of the group simultaneously. The majority, being oblivious to the new psychic forces, maintain the old psychic régime. The difficulty of reform, of transforming a social order, is principally due to these two causes.

The "character" of a people (psychic group) consists of its more or less unconscious, because structuralized or incarnate, ideas, emotions, and volitions. Chief among them are those concerning the character of God, the nature and value of man and woman, the necessary relation of character to destiny, the nature and meaning of life and death, and the nature and the authority of moral law. In proportion as the social order incorporates high or low views on these vital subjects, is the character of the people elevated and strong, or debased and weak.

The destiny of a people, and the rôle it plays in history, are determined not by chance nor yet by environment, but in the last analysis by its own character. Yet this character is not something given it complete at the start, an intrinsic psychical inheritance, nor is it dependent for transmission on biological heredity, passing only from parents to offspring. Character belongs to the sphere of social psychic life and is the subject of social heredity. Through social intercourse the moral character dominating a psychic group may be transmitted to members of an alien psychic group. This usually takes place through missionary activity. The moral character of a psychic group may in this way be fundamentally transformed, and with character, destiny.

Floating ideas, not yet woven into the warp and woof of life, not yet incarnate in the individual or in the social order, have little influence on the character of the individual or the group, however beautiful, true, or elevating such ideas may be in themselves. The character of a people is to be judged, therefore, not by the beauty or elevation of every idea that may be found in its literature, but only by those ideas that have been assimilated, that have become incorporated into the social order. These determine a people's character and destiny. According as these ideas persist in the social order, is its character permanent.

Progress consists of expanding life, communal and individual, extensive and intensive, physical and psychical. True progress is balanced. High communal development, that is, highly organized society, is impossible without the wide attainment of highly developed individuals. Progressive mastery of nature likewise is impossible apart from growing psychic development in all its branches, emotional, intellectual and volitional, communal and individual.

Historically, communalism is the first principle to emerge in consciousness. To succeed, however, it must be accompanied by at least a certain degree of individualism, even though it be quite implicit. The full development of the communal principle is impossible apart from the correspondingly full development of the individual principle. These are complementary principles of progress. Each alone is impossible. In proportion as either is emphasized at the expense of the other, is progress impeded. Arrested civilizations are due to the disproportionate and excessive development of one or the other of these principles.

Personality, expressing and realizing itself in communal and individual life, in objective and subjective forms, is at once the cause and the goal of progress. Social and psychic evolution are, therefore, in the last analysis, personal processes. The irreducible and final factor in social evolution and in social science is personality; for personality is the determinative factor of a human being.

Progress in personal development consists of increasing extent and accuracy of knowledge, refinement and elevation of emotions, and nobility and reliability of volitions. Progress in personal development requires the individual to pass from objective heterocratic to subjective autocratic or self-regulative ethical life. He must pass from the traditional to the enlightened, from the communal to the individualistic stage in ethics and religion. He must feel with increasing force the binding nature of the supra-communal sanctions for communal and individual life, accepting the highest dictates of the enlightened moral consciousness as the laws of the universe. But this means that the individual must secure increasing insight into the immutable and eternal laws of spiritual being and must identify his personal interests, his very self with those laws, with the Heart of the. Universe, with God himself. Only so will he become completely autonomous, self-regulative. Only thus will the individual become and remain an altruistic communo-individual, fitted to meet and survive the relaxation of the historic communal and supra-communal sanctions for communal and individual life, a relaxation induced by growing political liberty and growing intellectual rejection of primitive or defective religious beliefs.

Progress in personality is thus at bottom an ethico-religious process. The wide attainment of developed personality permits the formation of enlarging highly organized psychic groups, accompanied by increasing specialization of its individual members. This communal expansion, ramifying organization and individual specialization, secures increasing extensive and intensive intellectual understanding of the universe, and this in turn active mastery of nature, with all the consequences of growing ease and richness of life.

Ethico-religious, autonomous personality is thus the tap-root of highly developed and permanently progressive civilizations. Personality is, therefore, the criterion of progress. Mere ease of physical life, freedom from anxiety, light-hearted, care-free happiness, mastery of nature, material civilization, highly developed art, literature, and music, or even refined culture, are partial and inadequate, if not positively false, criteria.

Personality, as a nature, is an inherent psychic heritage shared by all human beings. It is transmitted only from parents to offspring, and its transmission depends only on that relation. Personality, as a varying psychic characteristic, is a matter of social inheritance, and is profoundly dependent, therefore, on the nature of the social order and the social evolution.

Religion, as incorporated in life, is the most important single factor determining the personality and character of its adherents, either hindering or promoting their progress.

Japanese social and psychic evolution have in no respects violated the universal laws of evolution. Japanese personal and other psychic characteristics are the product not of essential, but of social inheritance and social evolution. Japan has recently entered into a new social inheritance from which she is joyfully accepting new conceptions and principles of communal and individual life. These she is working into her social organism.

Already these are producing profound, and we may believe permanent, transformations in her social order and correspondingly profound and permanent transformations of her character and destiny.

THE END

INDEX

"Abdication": in church work, 84; due to past social conditions, 86; explains prominence of young men, 86, 161

Æsthetic characteristics: development unbalanced, 174; speech and conduct, 178; development of masses, 180; development, social not racial, 188

Adoption; family maintained, 215

Affection: post-marital, 102; its expression, 105

Agnosticism, old not new, 247

Alcock, Sir Rutherford: quotation misleading, 172; on untruthfulness, 255

Altruism, social or racial? 365

Ambition, 137

Ancestral worship and the importance of sons, 98

Apotheosis, 147; "Divine right of kings," 151; in Japan expresses unity, 152