Part 10

But food is anything but this. In its crude forms it is thinly scattered in the water, and small early beast-lets float around and grab it as they can. “You get food when it drops and you die when it stops—you helpless free agent of sorrow!”

Food in vegetable forms is also widespread and thin. The creatures that live on grass have had to develop the most cumbrous and involved of alimentary canals; huge barrels filled with many stomachs, supported by sturdy legs, as of tables, to hold the eating machine up, and carry it eternally about after its plentiful but highly diluted dinner. A concentrated vegetable food, like the fruit, brings out quite other qualities; as seen in all light swift arboreal animals, as the monkey; and between ground and tree rises the long neck of the giraffe—stretching, ever stretching, after his ascending dinner.

The humming-bird has slowly acquired a very special tongue to get his dinner, so has the butterfly; the tooth of the squirrel is necessitated by the stubborn nut; and the poor thirsting camel has his private portable food-and-water supply to meet the demands of life between far-scattered oases.

But when it appeared that food in predigested ready-to-eat packages was specially desirable; when the carnivorous habit was developed, then indeed we find a wild variety of adaptation to one’s dinner. Food in this form was not only widely scattered and difficult of access, but actively reluctant, sometimes even contentious. But means were found to encompass it. Was it small and hidden like the ant, yet numerous enough to pay for eating? Lo! the ant-eater’s slender snout and slenderer tongue pursue and capture it. Is it a fat grub, deep boring in the bark? The ingenious Javan monkey develops a special finger for his extradition. Does the insect fly waveringly from flower to flower? The bird flies more accurately and swiftly from insect to insect, and the hawk swoops still more efficiently from bird to bird.

Whatever form the dinner took, wherever the dinner went, there followed the fluent, ever-changing animal organism, producing tooth or claw, tongue or proboscis, seven stomachs or a private fish-pole—whatever was necessary to lure, catch, hold, inclose, and assimilate, this ever-receding and sometimes actively resisting, but always indispensable dinner. The evolution of animal organisms is conditioned mainly upon the food supply.

How does humanity figure in this transformation scene?

Man alone, of the whole animal kingdom, has attained a complete new stage in this imperative process of nutrition. Where the most primitive ameboid cell can but receive food; where the whole machinery of later organisms can but seize food; man, and man alone, produces food. Through all the ages, through every conceivable modification of structure and function, the animal has pursued its dinner. Man has caught it.

Man alone has permanently mastered his food supply; instead of an endless chase it is a closed circle—he makes that which makes him. That is why physical evolution stops with man—and psychical evolution begins. No longer at the mercy of thin grass, man makes the fat-grained corn; no longer endlessly chasing the buffalo, he raises the big steer. His prairie in the garden, his prey in the barnyard, the animal can rest at last, and man can grow. By what strange new power is this immense step taken, which has enabled this one out of all created forms to apply productive force, instead of mere destructive force, to his food supply? By the power of organisation. By entering upon that new life, the social life, which raises us above all lower forms.

The cell groups with others into the organ, the organs group again and form organisms; the organisms, once more combined, form an organisation. Society is the fourth power of the cell.

A low and limited form of social life began with the temporary union of hunters; loose fluctuating hordes, like those of wild dogs or wolves.

When cattle were kept instead of killed, were milked and sheared and bred with care and forecast, there arose a higher group form, the family. With an insured food supply at hand man sat quiet, watching his cattle; and with food to spare and time to spare, he began to grow. The family, our physical nucleus, grew too; grew as it had never grown before.

The limits of cattle-fed life were sharp and clear. There was no permanent home, no village, no extra-familiar intercourse, only warfare over pasture and water between tribe and tribe. But the hour came when corn was planted and eaten; and then our human life was indeed established.

The conditions of permanent physical juxtaposition, so essential to social growth, were met for the first time. The Hunter, requiring forty square miles of land per capita to chase at hazard his laborious prey, had no chance for social growth. Any other man on his forty miles was a competitor and reduced the supply of food, so he killed him if possible; and this habit also did not conduce to social growth. Families, too, were small when each man “did his own work” as these did. When came the Shepherd and his plenteous food, came larger families; but there was still a need of some five square miles per capita to feed the beasts; as the family grew the miles increased; and on the “free land” with its “equal opportunities” the families met at the edges and warred with one another as competitors. This, again, was not conducive to social growth.

But the Farmer, with far more food on far less land, food more richly and rapidly reproductive, and taking far less time to mature; with the family growing faster than ever, but taking up less room for its food supply; the Farmer is the base of the true social structure. Surplus nutrition and surplus time meant accumulated energy and frequent opportunity which, with the permanent home, allowed the birth and nurture of the industries and arts. The physical nearness of the people—acres instead of miles for their nutritive base—allowed of larger growth of language; and so in and with and following these conditions the social life became possible.

Note the absolute collectivity of this productive food process. The lowest food-producing unit is a village; not a separate man, or even a family. Agriculture is not found below a certain human group form. Social life is born with agriculture. The distinctive food processes of humanity are collective.

A second field of proof of our organic relation, and one as patent as the first, is the complex specialisation of humanity.

If you find a lump of protoplasm you cannot tell whether it is a whole or a part; if you divide it, its parts make wholes and prosper as before. Very low life-forms may be cut into fragments, and each develops whatever it lacks and makes a new whole. There is little differentiation here. But if you find an eye, a tooth, a claw, you are at no loss as to whether it is a whole or a part.

If it were a whole, it would be able to maintain and reproduce itself. Being a part, it can do neither. The eye is a remote, highly developed special organ, of no use to itself; able only to serve the complex organism of which it is a part; and nourished and maintained only by that organism. This condition is absolute proof of organic life as distinguished from individual.

Apply this proof to society. Society consists of numbers of interrelated and highly specialised functions, the functionaries being individual human animals. Society develops them—they could never have been evolved in solitude. As easily conceive of independent eyes, rolling around and doing business by themselves, as of independent teachers, carpenters, dentists. Society maintains them, as the body does the eye; intricate labours of many others feeding, warming, housing, protecting the teacher, while he teaches.

Alone he might hunt, and “support himself” as a separate animal; as if, conceivably, the eye could return to a protoplasmic condition and soak up a living somehow; but as an eye it would cease to exist; and he would cease to exist as a teacher. The teacher, teaching, cannot support himself. His time, his strength, his enormously specialised skill, are spent in teaching, and the society which made him and which needs him, necessarily supports him. Teaching as an activity is not predicable of individuals. It is a power to transmit the social gain in intelligence and knowledge among the social constituents. No solitary individual could have attained this knowledge and experience; and, if he had it, he could not teach it to himself. Teaching is a social function; a very elaborate and long-developed social function. The teacher is an extreme instance of the social functionary. Other than as a social functionary he does not exist.

This test may be applied far and wide, in every trade, art, science, or business; no human occupation escapes it. Whatever a man can do separately for himself, an ape can imitate. Whatever a man does which is worth falling human is done collectively and for others, it is a social function. He may work alone at his business, but the tools he works with are the fruit of slow social evolution, and the work he does is done for others. He may retire to the forest and think alone, but he thinks on the problems of human life; no personal affairs can occupy the energies of a human brain; and the brain he thinks with is a slow social product too.

The evolution of the interdependence of social function is as clear as that of the interdependent physical functions of our separate bodies. As early animal forms have few and simple functions, gradually evolving those more delicate and complicated, so do early societies have few and simple arts or trades, and similarly evolve them. As society progresses the trades flow wider, dividing and subdividing as they go, until we have the exquisitely sublimated special skill of the modern worker; and at each step of the process the organic relation tightens as well as widens; the specialist is less able to “take care of himself,” and the others are less able to do without the specialist.

“Every man to his trade” voices our popular recognition of this law, and “Jack-of-all-trades and master of none” shows the true merit of the “all-around-man.”

We now come to a third, and in itself a fully sufficient proof of the organic nature of society—not of the social organism as a useful figure, an illustration, an analogy, but as a literal biological fact. Here are a number of separate animal bodies. Each is a group of interactive organs, each does business for itself with no need of combination with another, save in the temporary union of sex with sex, and of mother with child. These creatures are individuals. Here again is a number of apparently separate animal bodies. But each has in his head an organ which cannot perform its functions alone; an organ which for its healthful use requires contact and exchange with similar organs lodged in other bodies.

This organ is the brain. That degree of brain development which we call “human” is only found in creatures socially related; it is not individual brain power, but social. The human brain, for health and usefulness, for its normal life, requires a number of human beings with whom to feel, think, and act. We can, it is true, physically isolate a human animal, and maintain his animal life; but his human life—i. e., social life; his “feelings” and “thoughts,” the whole field of brain activity—is injured.

The human brain is the social organ; it is our medium of contact and exchange. Set a man in absolute solitude and his brain is affected at once. Cut off from the contact which enables it to freely receive and discharge its supply of social energy, its action becomes increasingly morbid. In proportion to the completeness and duration of the isolation the brain is injured, and ultimately ruined.

We know the effect of solitary imprisonment, or of being cast away alone on some remote island. Short of this we know the progressive effect of degrees of isolation. The lighthouse keeper knows—they put two men in lighthouses most removed from social touch; and even that is a dangerously “short circuit” for the social organ to act in. The solitary shepherd knows, on the wide waste plains of Australia or Texas. The hermit or recluse of any age, the separate dwellers in old houses in the country, any human creature who lives alone, is injuriously affected in brain action.

This is not saying that mere privacy is harmful—that is a necessity for the social brain; such temporary solitude as shall enable it to work out its special contribution to our common thought, and to rest from the forceful social currents. But however solitary the student or author, the product of his labour is for others, and must reach them; his brain must connect with the others, though at long range.