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.

The social spirit is as “natural” as the individual spirit. It is conspicuously visible in action among us, but we have hidden it under false names.

“Altruism” is one of these. This in its very assumption of “others” preserves the ego intact, and that ego has never yet been convinced of any rational cause for surrendering to those other egos. We have only been able to urge it under our equally mistaken Pay concept, trying to show that we should meet reward either from the other egos, or from God. And as our nobler instincts have always revolted from the Pay concept, the progress of Altruism has been retarded.

We need merely to understand it to withdraw all this opposition. What we call altruism should be called—has been called^[1]—“omniism”; it is a feeling for all of us, and includes the ego. It is, if you please, an extension of self-consciousness, a recognition that my self is society, and my “ego” only a minute fraction of the real me.

This omniism is as normal a growth as egoism. The preservation of the individual by individual action required egoism, and developed it. The preservation of society, by collective action, requires omniism and develops it. That it is not more generally developed is due to the resistance and confusion of our brains.

The superiority of omniism to egoism is in its being a later and more complex development, an organic superiority. As the single cell is lower than the organism, so cell-consciousness, if there be such, is lower than self-consciousness, and as the single organism is lower than the social organism so self-consciousness is lower than social consciousness. Egoism is common to all beasts, is perfectly natural, useful, right; but omniism is a human distinction, progressively developed as we become socialised.

My “self” is my conscious area of working machinery, wherewith I receive impressions and produce expressions, and if I were a tenfold Siamese twin—if I felt, and thought, and worked with the bodies of twenty men—those twenty men would be my “self,” and to care for them would be as “selfish” as it is for a solitary animal to care for itself, and as perfectly right. Not to care for them, to be only actively conscious of my twentieth part “self,” would be a condition of arrested development, pitiable rather than blameworthy. In a social condition of existence, the life and prosperity of each member is absolutely interwoven with that of the others, of the whole, and not to recognise this, and act accordingly, is to manifest an inferior plane of development.

Organic relation of any sort is mutual, involving mutual obligation, duty, and, if necessary, sacrifice. When a physical body is starving to death, it is impressive to note the gradual surrender of its constituent parts in the order of their importance. First, he calls in all his savings,—the fat. Then the muscles slowly feed in their store. Lastly the “vital organs.” And all this is unconscious, managed by the long-established mechanism inside, without any dictation from the cerebral consciousness the man calls “self.”

Our internal social functions, the immediately necessary economic processes, may proceed unconsciously to quite a degree of development under the direction of egoism, because, as the social life is the main protection of the individual, so the interests of the individual and of society are in many ways identical, and the individual may serve society very fully and never dream that he is doing anything more than to “take care of himself.” But Society cannot proceed far in development before the interests of the whole may involve a temporary subversion of the interests of the past, and here a beneficial social conduct requires social consciousness.

Our carefully preserved ego concept acts mischievously in proportion to the progress of society. The more complex the social process, the larger the social interests involved, the more injurious is this primitive spirit of egoism. The selfishness of a peasant is far less harmful than the selfishness of a railroad-owner. In the orderly development of social economics this would have been taken care of by the natural extension of feeling accompanying the extension of action, but that has been checked, as usual, by our mental heirlooms. Nevertheless we can observe this natural relation of action and feeling in spite of our opposition.

The growth of altruism in certain special industries is most instructive to study, as showing precisely what conditions most regularly and rapidly develop it. Look, for instance, at the distinctive characteristics educed by the industries of agriculture and navigation.

Sailors, as a class, are generous, quick in heroism, licentious, intemperate, and profane.

Farmers, as a class, are by no means generous—frequently stingy; you never heard of a sailor who was a miser, but often of farmers who are such. The farmer is not quick to heroism, but, on the contrary, is slow to recognise his class-needs, hard to organise, prone to the most primitive individualism. On the other hand the farmer is comparatively chaste, and temperate, and guarded in speech.

Why these obvious distinctions, in men of the same race, class, and time, often of the same families? As obviously from the difference in their industries.

The farmer is engaged in our most remote and ancient industry, the one nearest the bottom, in fact it is the bottom of real social growth; only the cattle-keeper stands between the farmer and the savage. The farmer is more nearly self-supporting than any other member of society. He is still in the short-circuit activities of the self-feeder; while his surplus product does in truth feed the world and give us all a chance to grow, he sees nothing of the world he feeds, and, blinded by our customs of exchange, thinks that in selling corn he is but feeding his family. Therefore the farmer is naturally egoistic—inevitably so unless he recognises the social nature of his function.

But as the farmer marries early and easily; woman, too, on that plane of economic activity being a valued co-agent in living, like the squaw; so the farmer is under no strong temptation to unchastity. His life of out-of-door muscular exertion is another help here. Lacking other forms of association, the church is a welcome social ground for the farmer and his wife; so he conforms easily to the current standard of morality. And with this moral tendency and lack of startling events, we find the reason for his temperance in speech and other habits.

In the sailor’s life, the opposite conditions obtain. His is a late and highly socialised industry. He combines with other men in elaborately specialised labour for the benefit of innumerable widely scattered people. His combination is absolute for considerable periods of time, and physically isolated from all other social forms. The dangers of the profession are great, requiring constant watchfulness and the most prompt and perfect interdependence. From the seamen singing and hauling together to the quick co-ordination between the captain on the bridge and the uttermost sailor on the yards, there is this constant interplay and conspicuous interdependence. Of course, they develop a high degree of comradeship—of course, they stand by one another to the last degree of danger. It indicates no greater nobility in Jack Jones, who went to sea, over Jedediah Jones, who stayed on the farm; it is a quality of his industry, that is all.

So with the other traits. The sailor is communally fed while engaged in these common activities. The ego is not called out in any way. Then, his private share of wealth being given him at the same time when he is turned loose to provide for himself, he naturally pours forth the money freely; a trait well known by all the barnacles and borers who infest the sailor ashore, as others do the ships at sea.

The sailor has no wife; he cannot marry as early as the farmer, because Jack has to support his wife at long range out of his earnings; she being of no service in maintaining the family. Or, if married, he must be away from his wife for long periods. Thus denied the natural relations of the sexes and exposed when ashore to the instant swooping down of the parasitic female animal in her frankest form, he is, inevitably, “immoral.” Let Jedediah go to sea and Jack stay at home, and you reverse the characteristics of each.

The intemperance comes under the action of these last conditions, long-enforced abstinence and sudden profusion; and the profanity is coincident with the sudden shocks of excitement in his work, with all the jars, difficulties, and dangers involved. For similar reasons ox-drovers are less given to profanity than mule-drivers. Thus we see the vices and virtues of a given profession inhere in its conditions. Individual character may fight against it, and there is a difference always in the personal expression, but as industrial classes the farmer and the sailor manifest certain distinctive characteristics involved in their form of industry.

Miners furnish another conspicuous instance of this force. In no class of men—not even in sailors—is altruism, even to heroism, more prominent. Given death and danger well-nigh certain, but comrades to be saved, and the miners always volunteer at once. If valour and self-sacrifice among miners were rewarded as they are in some sporadic rescue of the drowning, we should need to run a factory of decorations. The miner, like the sailor, is engaged in a highly socialised industry. He works at great personal sacrifices to promote the social welfare.

The farmer, in his corn, sees tangible immediate food for himself and family. The miner sees no such prompt advantage in his coal. The farmer, safely and alone, pursues his individual labours. The miner, in danger and in company, pursues his group labour. They are cut off from the rest of the world, the mining group, and easily develop a common consciousness. Their danger is a common danger, only to be met and overcome by common action. Hence they act in common and for each other.

This may be studied in varying degree in all industries. The effect of household labour on the growth of altruism is even worse than that of farm labour. The farmer does in truth connect with the whole world, serve the whole world through his products. The domestic labourer connects with nothing but the family, serves nothing but the family. Absolutely the most primitive form of human labour surviving among us is that of the woman “doing her own work” like the squaw. The only enlargement admitted is that of domestic service, being a survival of the next lowest form, slave labour. This industry, in its shortest of short circuits, develops no social spirit whatever; nothing but egoism and familism grow from it.

Altruism, due to other causes, may be felt and manifested by the domestic worker, but the work does not conduce to it. Conversely, when this stage of labour is at last abandoned; when we have socialised these antiquated industries; an immense increase of altruism will appear. We are so accustomed to think of men as egoists, and women as altruists that it will be a blow to many to advance this position, but seeing that altruism, the social spirit, is but the essential condition and result of our social co-activities; that only men take part in these activities, and that women have been arrested in this natural development and forced to remain as they began, working in solitude and utter disconnection, for their own families solely; it is plain that the world’s growth in altruism comes through men as a class, and that women as a class contribute to the social spirit only an exaggerated familism and egoism. That animal instinct shown in “the maternal sacrifice,” or the devotion to one’s mate of exaggerated sex development, have nothing to do with the larger human love—with omniism.

The two are constantly blended through heredity, but the industrial influence of the sexes is as above stated, and it is through industrial development that our altruism comes. Observe that the nations most “humane” are those most advanced in industry, and those least “humane” are those most primitive in industry, down to the savage who has only the rudiments of either industry or humanity. Altruism is recognised by religion as a virtue and urged upon us, but it appears in us only in proportion to our social progress in interrelated service. Our own principal religion, Christianity, is altruism incarnate—but it is not altruism understood. It preaches altruism as a virtue and a duty, but it does not show altruism to be a natural product of certain industrial relations and urge upon its followers their entering upon those relations as the chief means of developing altruism.

Religion has not showed us the naturalness of altruism. It has taught that it was natural for man to be selfish, and that to be unselfish was a continual struggle, needing the grace of God to attain it. When we learn at last that the social instincts are as natural as the personal, that they are evolved under the same biological laws, that our failure to manifest them in due proportion is due to unnecessary social conditions quite within our power to change—the burden on man’s conscience will be lifted forever.

We shall learn to lay no false stress on altruism as a lofty and difficult virtue, but see it to be the spirit of civilisation; and the lack of it, the uncivilised egoism still so prominent and evilly active, we shall perceive to be merely an anachronism, which needs only to be recognised to be despised, and only to be despised to be outgrown.

A man still maintaining a visible egoism in a period of dominant altruism, would feel as uncomfortable as a man with a tail. A tail was “natural” to us once,—not now.

Another vital error, maintained by our religions, is the confusion of altruism, the social spirit, with that abnormal action known as “charity”—“benevolence,” “philanthropy.” We are taught to regard the expression of this rare and hard-won feeling of altruism as requiring us to “sell all we have and give to the poor.”

Giving to the poor, from direct alms to the subtle ramifications of organised charity, bears about the same relation to a healthy working altruism that the transfusion of blood bears to a mother’s nursing a child. There are times when a direct transfer of subsistence is called for in society, as in some great disaster, like the Chicago fire, or Johnstown flood, or awful submersion of Galveston.

So there are cases when one human being may save another’s life by giving him his own blood through a syringe. But you would find it difficult to raise men to a daily level of devotion willing to transfer blood as a steady diet to their anÆmic friends; and it is similarly difficult to persuade the healthy working mass of society that any such sacrificial transfer of property is right and reasonable.

They are quite correct in this position. Charity is not right. It may be necessary at times, but it is not a normal organic process. A healthy working altruism involves no sacrifice of one to another, but the common good-will, and common effort for a common good. We err in the very word—it should not be “other-ism”—but “our-ism.” There is no justice or benefit in “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” but there is in each giving to all—for all includes each.

Just as our foolish “business” methods deal and shuffle money among the rich without adding a cent to our wealth, so does our foolish charity deal and shuffle it among the poor, with similar uselessness. The fact that we are, and always have been, so open to the demands of charity, proves our social spirit, but proves also that we have not understood its nature and its use.

One more error that hinders our realisation of this great feeling is our persistent misuse of the word “self.”

The Ego, the personal consciousness, desires for itself and strives for itself. The Socio, the social consciousness, desires for us, for ourself, and strives for society. But we, feeling this larger desire and impulse, think it is the Ego still at work, and speak of the colossal “Selfishness” of man. It is not Selfishness—it is Socialness; and he, not knowing what it is, tries to satisfy it by satisfying himself.

The futile attempts of a modern man trying to be selfish would be funny if the effects were not so dangerous. Here he is, with this enormous area of social consciousness, this enormous stock of social energy, this enormous field of social activity, all lodged in the executive machine of one small biped animal.

He is awed and impressed by the vast currents of feeling that sweep through the social consciousness. “Dear me!” he says; “what a great mysterious thing is my soul!” It would be mysterious, indeed, if John Smith had a soul of that size. He feels the irresistible pressure of the social energy. “Ah!” he says; “how strong I am!” He launches out into the social activities, doing, it may be, his full share of social service, but thinking that he is doing it himself, for himself.

And then—poor hungry tortured soul—he tries to satisfy the social demands he feels by gratifying his own personal desires. The capacity for personal enjoyment is extremely limited, and mainly physical. Warmth, quiet, cleanliness, food, rest, physical exercise, and the joys of mating and rearing young; these the ego wants, and every ego ought to be guaranteed their full gratification. They cost little, they were long ago well within the assets of every civilised society. But a society wants more. All our higher needs are social. “We” want them, and we shall never be satisfied till “we” have them—all of us.

Suppose the inhabitants of a certain city need more rest, or recreation, or entertainments, or better facilities of communication. The individual citizen feels the wants of the city. He cannot satisfy that want in himself till the city is satisfied. The misguided self-styled egoist, feeling the social needs, tries to quench the demand by gratifying himself. He soon reaches personal satiety—and is still unsatisfied. Of course. Here is another of the alleged “enigmas” of human life cleared up.

Q. Why is man so inordinately selfish?

A. He isn’t. He is social-ish and doesn’t know it.

Q. Why is man never satisfied in spite of all he gets?

A. Because he hasn’t found his mouth yet. He is hungry for a thousand, and tries to give a thousand dinners to himself to quench that hunger.

When humanity sees its own governing spirit, recognises its own consciousness as a common consciousness, and goes practically to work to meet its common needs, the human soul will find peace. It will not stop growing, but it will become healthy, and grow right. The upward reach of the human soul will carry always its unfulfilled aspirations, but that is but an open road, a glorious ever-spreading opportunity; the way of life; a very different thing from the wailings and convulsions of a crippled and imprisoned soul, struggling for air—for food—for room to grow.

Each human being represents humanity. Each has within him as much of the human soul as he can feel and express, and if he increases his expression he will feel more. But to call that great Social Spirit “mine”; to try to explain it by any sort of self-bound theory; to try to exercise or gratify it within the limits of the individual life—is almost too absurd for illustration. Some private pipe connecting with the ocean, and the owner of the pipe prating of “the mystery of ‘my’ tides,” is a possible simile.

The pressure of the great thing has been so beyond our visible ego that we have been forced to account for it by the hypothesis of personal immortality. There was evidently no room for the soul—no explanation of the soul—in one human life as we saw it before us. “But,” said we, “if we make a human life long enough there will be room for the soul! That will give us time to understand it, and to gratify these quenchless aspirations, these boundless desires.”

It did not occur to us that if we made it wide enough it would have the same effect. Our illimitable egoism, being unable to satisfy its own demands by any earthly means, has postulated an eternal ego, with whole ranges of planetary systems to feed in, and hopes, in course of eternity, time not being enough, to satisfy Itself!

And so, postponing the problems it could not answer to a conveniently extensive after life; and considering its own agonies and contortions in this life as part and parcel of the great game between God and the Devil; it has struggled and suffered on; pushed relentlessly upward by the organic social forces, held down most cruelly by its self-made bands of iron; the rigid clamps of primitive ignorance renewed from generation to generation, in spite of the increasing agony of the growing soul.

No wonder we are more unhappy than we used to be; we are bigger, much bigger, but the ego hasn’t grown at all. The social spirit of a small young society could masquerade as an ego without too painful inconvenience; but the social spirit of the world to-day is so vast, so strong, so much nearer to expression in our more developed minds, so much more commonly felt, owing to our more equal education, that its confinement to an ego is too agonising to endure,—it is simply impossible.

Therefore we see the steady growth of “public spirit,”—“civic feeling,” national and international movements toward general improvement; more and more individuals, rich and poor, devoting themselves to social service; the growing objection to war; the tendency to distribute as well as to accumulate millions; the development of “the home church”; and even—most hopeful of all these splendid signs of life—even the rising current of organisation among women.

This Ego hypothesis might as well be laid aside at once and forever. We are not separate creatures at all, our life is ours, and only so to be rightly lived. It is so easy,—leaving off the ego-theory,—to observe the natural growth of the social spirit in its ever-broadening, steady pressure and in those bursts of irresistible energy we call passion.

Any intense human feeling we call a passion, using the word to distinguish certain main lines of feeling common to us all, as “the maternal passion,” “the tender passion,” and those broad divisions Hate, Fear, Envy, Remorse, Ambition, Grief, Revenge. Also some special gust of intensity in minor lines of feeling is distinguished by the same word, “a passion of gratitude,” “a passion of loneliness,” “a passion of rebellion,” or of avarice.

Our words climb slowly along the facts, changing as our perception changes, and always behind. Heat as a fact we observed and used long before we knew what to call it, if, indeed, what we call it now is any more true than it was before. But, whether “a fluid” named Caloric, or “a force” named Heat, the fact which we all know and use remains the same. It did its work in the world as fully before we came as after; before we named it at all as after. But to us, to our consciousness, the thing does not exist until we see it, and, seeing, name.

“The maternal passion” is as strong a force in mother-wasp and mother-whale as in the most sophisticated and analytic mother-human. These passions are simply accumulations of stored energy along certain much-used lines, and serve to keep up a steady flow of the desired energy when there is no immediate stimulus to call for it. In the maternal passion, for instance, long ages of iron experience have developed a certain average of watchfulness and care even when the young are visibly safe, and a surprising fund of power and fury in defence of the young even when the exciting cause is comparatively small. It keeps up a safer average of care and defence than if the feeling were merely reactionary, and has therefore been developed in surviving species.

Society, the vast and varied organism in which we live, calls for a devotion more single and fearless than that even of the mother; for a steady average of service and a sudden fund of fury in defence, a love and care and courage higher than any heretofore required; and as it needs such a feeling it gets it. Those societies having it most highly developed survive. We have called it many names; let us now give it another, the Social Passion.

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.