Part 5

Society is a psychic condition; all social relations exist and grow in the human mind. That one despot can rule over a million other men rests absolutely on their state of mind. They believe that he does; let them change their minds, and he does not. As a human animal the despot is of such size, weight, colour—he is a physical fact. As a Despot—he is but a psychical fact—he exists as a Despot only in the minds of men. (This is not Christian Science, but sociological science.) He is a concept, a common concept, acting under which all men do thus and thus; outgrowing which, they discard their Despot and adopt some other political belief.

In pre-social planes of evolution we do not find this factor in determining conduct. Earlier forms of life reacted directly to conditions and were modified by them. Man reacts to external conditions as do other animals, but also he acts according to these special inner conditions—his ideas. The power to form and retain concepts, and act under their influence precisely as if they were facts, is what gives the element of special progress and also of perversity to human conduct. This internal environment, the general furnishing of a man’s brain, and more particularly its basic concepts, do more to determine his action than does external environment. His reaction to external conditions is modified by these internal conditions; unless you know them you cannot predict the result; unless you change them you cannot change the result.

Present the same conditions of shipwreck to sailors of different nationalities, and see how widely they differ in conduct. A crew of Chinamen, wild with terror or in a stupor of fatalism, show no discipline or courage, they can scarce save themselves. A crew of the Latin race, as was so lamentably shown in the wreck of the Bourgogne, seek frantically to save themselves, at the expense of passengers, women, and children. A crew of English or Americans show self-control, resource, courage. They save first the women and children and the passengers, last themselves. If there is no escape they preserve their discipline to the last, as in the crew of the Victoria going down to death in perfect order, to the sound of music.

Even under that imminent pressure, the most direct modifying force in nature, the fear of death—the action of the human being depends more upon his character, that is, upon the sum of his concepts and consequent habits, than on the present environment. Maternal instinct is one of the strongest and most deep-seated in nature, but under the action of certain religious concepts, mothers have given their babies to Moloch or to the Ganges. The sex instinct is of incalculable force, but under the action of certain concepts men and women have been known to stultify it absolutely in voluntary celibacy.

An excellent proof of the power of concepts compared with conditions is given in the heroism of William Phelps, the Indianapolis negro. Two coloured men were at work in a great boiler, riveting. Some person by accident turned on the steam. Hot steam as a material condition is quite forcible, and the two men started for the ladder. But Phelps, who was foremost, was arrested by a concept. He stepped back, saying to the other, “You go first—you’re married!” Even in that comparatively undeveloped brain, a group of concepts as to Duty and Honour were stronger modifiers of conduct than boiling steam.

This power of directing action by concepts is at once our great advantage and disadvantage. If the concepts are true, if they are founded on fact and in accordance with law, they promote advantageous conduct; if they are false, they promote disadvantageous conduct. Even if once true, that is, as true as the brains of a given period, acting on the knowledge of that period, could comprehend, they become mischievous if not changed to suit the larger brains and larger knowledge of a later time. As shown in the previous chapter, this is precisely our difficulty. We are always being hindered by our back-acting brain. Society progresses far more rigidly than our recognition of it. The acts and facts of to-day continually diverge from the concepts of yesterday.

History exhibits an endless series of man’s efforts to check his own growth. Patient, persistent, ingenious, devout, he has laboured incessantly to stay where he was—where he used to be; and is continually astonished to find himself still in motion and going upward. In dealing with the average human brain, these deterrent forces are constantly met; the mere physical resistance to a new process of thought; and a conscious, yes, and conscientious, resistance to a concept not in accordance with the previous supply.

That common resistance to progress called prejudice is a physical brain condition. Certain ideas are early formed, usually under strong pressure, and no further action is taken on that subject, no admission of new ideas, no examination of what is already there. This inactive area dwindles in disuse, is ill-nourished because unused, becomes stiff and feeble; and it is exceedingly difficult to make any fresh impression on the neglected part. When another person does try to arouse thought in that locality, to explain, convince, persuade, enlighten, he is confronted with this thick, inert mass we call a prejudice.

Prejudices are stronger and more extensive among the ignorant, because the brain is so little used in any part that the clogged areas spread and thicken undisturbed for generations. The lumpy brain is transmitted in turn to the young, and the false ideas promptly reinserted during each child’s defenceless infancy, so that in time a formidable obstacle to progress is developed, called race-prejudice. The more learned are not absolutely free from prejudice, only relatively so in comparison with the more ignorant. In whatever portion of the brain we do not actively think, we find an accumulating tendency to prejudice.

A healthy and active brain, used to free movement and clear connection, is affronted by any inert mass among its vital processes, as a housekeeper is affronted by some mouldy heap in a disused closet and cleans it out energetically. Old and familiar subjects are more heavily clogged in this way than those more recent and less known, yet prejudices will form, if allowed, even on the most recent of sciences. A brain, like any other organ, must be frequently and fully used to keep it healthy.

These natural tendencies of the brain, the inertia of habit and the local stiffening of prejudice, would not be so injurious if left to the healthy counteracting influence of equally natural tendencies to growth. But the passive resistance has been rendered active and infinitely multiplied in power by the conscious brain action which has so mistakenly exalted its worst faculties, and choked the growth of its best ones.

We very early made it the highest test of virtue to believe what we could not understand; i. e., to hold by main force an unassimilated idea, like a stone in the stomach; and an equal test of sin to presume to examine this irritating mass.

The organic method is to relate each perception to those previously received. The brain is of its own nature logical. Impressions made upon it are sorted and stored in definite connection. This may be noted in ordinary conversation, as when the hearer discovers that the stream of talk he understood to concern Jane was really about Mary. “Oh!” says he, with a sense of physical un-ease as of one who has stepped down where there was no step, “I thought you were talking about Jane!” and there is a pause while he hastily pulls out all those statements from group “Jane” in his mind, and rearranges them in group “Mary.”

By this natural power of relating impressions, called consistency, we are able to form a connected scheme of things and work rationally thereunder. If any of these impressions are incorrect, it leads to further error; and if the false impressions be those of main importance, the whole fabric of mental association will be wrong.

Thus a belief in luck necessarily tends to underrate mere knowledge—study, accuracy. The woman who says she “has no luck with her bread” is not likely to go to a cooking school. Take the full extension of this same concept about luck—chance—fate—and you get fatalism, the logical consequence of which is seen in those backward and inert nations where it rules. They may make good fighters, but never good inventors—discoverers—creators; they endure life, but do not promote its development. Religious history gives us plenty of “awful examples” of the power of one radically wrong concept to fill the mind with error, and the world with blood and tears.

Our disinclination to accept a statement which does not agree with those previously held is the brain’s physical rejection of an impression claiming to belong to a certain group, but finding no connection there. If forced to accept it as incontrovertibly true, we must then throw out all the others and wholly rearrange that group of concepts. This is where we say “Ah! that alters the case,” when some patent fact forces us to “change our minds.”

If forced to accept facts indisputably true, but as far as we can see irreconcilable, there can be no mental action whatever on that subject. They are held by force in the brain, but do not grow there and do not lead to any further grouping of concepts. This state of mind is familiar to the guessers of charades. “My first is this,” “my second is that”—“my whole is so and so”—and the brain seizes these detached assertions and seeks for some possible arrangement in which they will “make sense” as we call it—or else “gives it up.” If the riddle has been misstated, it is impossible to guess it. And this is the first great difficulty in what has been so long called the riddle of human life—it has been misstated. No wonder we have had to give it up.

The value of that proper relation of ideas we call consistency is this: A brain with all its concepts in natural sequence and order transmits energy in a smooth, continuous stream. The brain with inconsistent concepts, lodged in thought-tight compartments, loses energy in cross-currents, contradictions, culs-de-sac; and the resultant conduct is weak and uncertain. Each root idea tends to modify conduct its way; and if the root ideas do not agree neither does the conduct. Often it results in mere inhibition—we see this act to contradict that—cannot reconcile them—and so do nothing. The basic concepts of early man were wrong. His observation was necessarily narrow, his deductions most partial, his whole position one of repeated errors, as is so generally true of all extreme youth. These errors of the undeveloped brain would have given way in course of normal development to better thinking, as the child’s missteps lead on to better walking, but for the ill-founded Grandpa theory.

The traditional superiority of the past, on the authority of statements open to no examination and no criticism, rapidly developed into ancestor worship and that whole great retroactive tendency of thought which is still so heavily dominant among us. In it we have deified inertia, as best instanced in China. Assuming that the crude theories of humanity’s youth were true, the brain tried to correlate them; to form some connected scheme of life based on such premisses. This was functionally impossible. No healthy brain could “make sense” of such postulates as these. As a consequence, normal brain action on such lines ceased. Abnormal brain action developed freely, its extreme being what we call fanaticism. Those who attended to the maintenance of ancient concepts soon found that any increase of mental activity led to the unsettling of their supposed truth; and so, with the best of intentions, used every possible means to discourage such activity.

And as the average mind found itself forbidden to think on certain of the most important lines in life, and unable to think logically on such bases as were allowed, it simply accepted them as “unthinkable” and so admitted in the common stock of ideas these disconnected heaps of arbitrary statement. Our natural tendency to relate and connect our percepts and concepts in logical sequence, so as to form a rational collection agreeing with itself and with our behaviour, has been not only neglected but prevented; and this arbitrary disconnection of mental processes has been so thorough and universal that we have grown to expect what we call “inconsistency” in human action.

Yet consistency is one of the brain’s most essential laws. We expect things to be consistent, we demand it. Talk disconnectedly to the most ordinary person and he soon cries, “What on earth are you talking about? I don’t see what that has to do with it!” And we all know how busy our brains are, trying to make out to ourselves that our own conduct is consistent. We are naturally consistent, but the unbroken centuries of violent insertion and compulsory retention of irreconcilable statements in the young brain have perverted natural action and trained us in an artificial inconsistency.

This enforced maintenance of older concepts has for its result this: At any given period in history the ideas of the common mind are found to antedate the facts. The facts of the twentieth century are approached with the ideas, feelings, prejudices of the tenth. And as our conscious acts are modified by those ancient concepts, our acts are necessarily behind the times. Changing conditions constantly demand revision of the conduct of society, but if that conduct—so far as it is consciously ours—is based on unchanging ideas, there must be conflict. There has been, always. Take some well-known historic instance, as the French Revolution.

Here was a long-established social relation, that of feudalism, lineal descendant of still remoter patriarchal grouping, producing in the conscious mind a highly developed concept or group of concepts, described in the phrase, “l’ancien régime.” Meanwhile the conditions which made feudalism an advantageous form of social relation changed intrinsically. The natural basis in fact was gone, but the idea remained firmly intrenched in the mind. Acting under the idea, feudalism was maintained, but the change in conditions proceeded irresistibly.

Some few there were whose minds consciously perceived the change in conditions, formed new concepts, and sought to transmit those concepts. But this effort was on the one hand too limited in range, and on the other too vague and varied in form, to really bring about the change, or wisely guide it. The action of the cruel facts on a no longer normal social relation, resulted in a vast reaction, quite uncontrollable by the newer ideals.

The endeavour to reconstruct society on the theory of the “social contract,” or any other then advanced, naturally failed, as the endeavour to maintain an outworn system failed, and the carnage and confusion, the partial reaction to the old basis, the slow, irregular, fumbling progress toward a better state were the results, as we have seen. That conduct which led to the improvement of the social system in France was resultant from conditions and not from concepts.

In our own recent experience with the system of human slavery we have another marked instance, both in the irresistible trend of progressive conditions which brought the change and in the splendid effort to alter those governing concepts on which the system rested in the minds of men. In the abolition movement we have the conscious human effort to alter conscious conduct. The physical extension of our national boundaries and the mechanical extension of economic processes was the unconscious pressure of conditions which also modified conduct. And against both stood the vast weight of brain inertia, and the unending array of false concepts, dating back to the historic period when slavery was a useful relation, and buttressing itself with the crudest quotations from ancient religions.

The power of the freely developing brain to keep pace with new social relations and proclaim newly perceived truth is offset by the tremendous undertow of the undeveloped brain and its power to compel acceptance of ancient errors.

In a long-range view of social progress it would seem that in early times the conscious mind had a very small share in our development, and that conditions did almost all, even while man fondly thought that he did; but as society grows and the brain grows in spite of itself, the balance of power swings steadily toward conscious conduct. A broader religion and a fuller education make the formation and transmission of ideas continually easier; and personal freedom so accustoms us to handle our own conduct that the power of humanity to consciously improve its world is now a large and growing factor in social evolution.