Part 17

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.