Part 14

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.

Once more, a small and literal instance: if a charitable body is founded,—an “institution” in that limited and unlovely sense,—in the “inmates,” both officials and beneficiaries, speedily appears the spirit of that body, and a very disagreeable one it is. Wherever interdependent functions are established appears organic life; a common body to perform these functions, a common spirit to co-relate them.

The social spirit is a common consciousness developed by common activities, and appearing in us in proportion to the extent and interrelation of those activities. To share in it demands of the individual, male or female, a share in the collective activities which constitute human life.

Activities performed by one’s self alone, for one’s self alone, or one’s immediate physical relatives, are not distinctively human, and do not develop the human spirit.

An agricultural population manifests certain traits in common the world over. Distinctions of blood and of religion are in abeyance before the unifying force of a common industry as a modifier of character. Fishermen, or sailors, or miners, or traders invariably show marked traits in common, however otherwise differentiated.

If all men followed one industry we should have one principal character; but fortunately our social processes are increasingly varied. There does arise, however, a steadily widening field of common character as the traits demanded by all industries alike increase among us. All industries require peace and self-control; a regard for law and for organisation; and these tendencies steadily improve the social spirit as we leave savagery farther and farther behind.

Commerce requires honesty and accuracy, and steadily develops them, though commerce is more open to certain retroactive influences than the directly productive processes. Productive industry, being the economic necessity which brings us together, is the source of our social spirit, and that spirit is constantly modified by changes in the forms of industry.

Our social consciousness is of slow and partial development, as is easily explicable. The highly developed personal consciousness which the most primitive savage brought with him into social relation, and which occupies the same field of sensation as the wider social consciousness, has operated to prevent easy recognition of the latter. The social pleasures and the social pains we took to be personal and sought or avoided them as such. Even the most sublimated and morbidly acute social consciousness, as shown in a passionate philanthropy, is still diagnosed by some as a form of self-gratification, so persistent is the dominance of the egoistic concept.

Another reason is that as our external activities, requiring conscious cerebration, are more perceptible than our internal ones, so we were far more easily impressed by the external activities of Society than by its deep-seated organic processes; these external ones were more telic, partook more of the nature of personal actions, and were readily thought to be such.

A third and very strong force operating against our recognition of social consciousness is that it so generally hurts. So long as our organic social processes went on normally they were unconscious. Individual man, well fed, well guarded, reproducing the race in peace and comfort, sported in the sea of social well-being and failed to observe that there was such a thing. But let any industry become inflamed, or paralysed, or arrested, and the pain is felt far and wide. No one likes to be hurt. The more socially we felt our pain the more it hurt, of course, being bigger. To be hungry one’s self is one thing—to feel a famine is another. People with the most social consciousness suffered most, so long as social processes were not healthy; and, therefore, our effort has been to resist the increase of social consciousness.

We say “mind your own business”—“don’t concern yourself about other people,” “let the other man walk.” We try not to feel the famine in India, the flood in China, the ignorance in Russia, the cruelty in Armenia, the crimes and casualties, the deformities and diseases of our own great cities. But in spite of our natural reluctance to a widening of the sensorium that thrills most to pain, it is widening in spite of us.

More and more every year we are feeling common evils, and seeking to remove them. It is not that “I” am seeking to relieve “my” distress and improve “my” conditions, but that “we,” in institute and association, club, congress, and convention, are rousing more and more to a consciousness of “our” distress, and seeking methods by which “we” may improve “our” conditions. This marks the growth of social consciousness. A pleasant thought here is that as fast as social conditions improve so fast does social consciousness become an avenue of pleasure instead of pain, and so we shall encourage instead of oppose it; thus the improvement will widen more and more rapidly.

Something we see already of the larger joy obtainable in social consciousness, in our pleasure in one another’s work. I do not mean in personal consumption of it, so to speak, but in our satisfaction in the achievements of “our” business men, “our” “scientific men,” “our” inventors, mechanics, artists, discoverers, teachers, and the like. “We” take pleasure and pride in what “we” do—requiring social consciousness.

Children’s games show the natural development of this feeling in the human being. A child likes to play alone if he has to; but children like far better to play together—the excitement and joy of co-ordinate activity being far greater than in individual activity. This delight in collective expression increases from age to age. As measured merely by popular sports and amusements, the game involving a contest of team with team is more enjoyed than the older sport of individual race and contest, both by spectator and player.

There remains one more strong cause for our slow-born recognition of social consciousness, and that is the position of women. Their activities being confined to an excessive development of sex functions, and industry on the low stage of solitary disconnected performance, or at most the first step of group labour, personal service; and this industry, too, confined to self or family interest altogether; it is not to be expected that any high degree of social spirit could be attained by this inchoate mass of individuals in society, but not of it, taking no part in its processes economic or politic, and no share in its growing responsibilities; nor is it to be expected that men, though increasingly socialised by themselves, could avoid the influence of this unsocialised half of humanity, both through its daily companionship and the tremendous effect of maternity.

We are still further affected by the result of the position of women in maintaining an abnormal degree of sex-tendency, and we have seen how anti-social an influence is the natural belligerence and destructiveness of masculine energy in excess; therefore, it is no wonder at all that our social development has been slow, erratic, and liable to extremely morbid forms and processes. Nothing will conduce so much to the right growth of society in body and spirit as the progress of women from their position of prehistoric sex-bound egoism and familism, to their rightful share and place in the vital processes of Society. They, as half the component individuals of Society, will then contribute their share of modern social feeling and action; they, becoming more human and less disproportionately sexual, will reduce the influence of morbid sex-tendency in both male and female; and they, as mothers, will rapidly fill the world with full-blood human beings, instead of the present half-bloods,—half socialised through the father, but held in prehistoric individualism through the mother.