“The fundamental reform for which the times call is rather a reconsideration of the ends for which all civilised government exists, in a word, the return to a saner measure of social values.”—Lord Morley.

THE next stage in the realisation of the democratic ideal would appear to be tolerably clear. We are moving toward an extension of the democratic principle into the economic and industrial sphere; but is the movement governed by an understanding of the goal we have in view? Are we sure that our immediate policies are consistent with the “far gain” which we should seek? Or are we to regard progress purely as a somewhat blind experimental affair, largely beyond control? We are obviously moving—somewhere; the movement indeed promises to be an improvement. But are there any tests which can be applied to it in order that we may satisfy ourselves that the course we are on will land us safely in port?

I

Mr. Thorstein Veblen has rendered an important service to this generation by showing how the technology of the machine industry has invaded our minds and led us to an almost exclusive pre-occupation with processes. It is this intellectual bias which explains—at least in great part—our complete capitulation to the Darwinian hypothesis and accounts for the way in which we have pressed it out of its proper sphere to furnish clues in religion, history, and ethics—regions in which there are factors to be considered which are not included among the data of the doctrine of biological evolution. Here also is the explanation of the wide acceptance of the pragmatist philosophy. Pragmatism is indeed the characteristic philosophy of the machine-age; its postulate “that truth is what works” is clearly derived from the engine-shop, where efficiency is the only rule. Generally it may also be said that it is this mechanistic attention to processes which accounts for the importance and omnicompetency ascribed to the still juvenile science of psychology; and this is particularly true of the application of psychology and psychological method to the problems of sociology.

Psychology is the fruit of the application of the scientific method to mental processes; its subject matter consists of the observable phenomena of mind. Its application to sociology has produced an almost exclusive concentration on social functions; and while this has important uses, it does not furnish us with the clue we need to our sociological tasks. Mental functions, whether of the individual or of society, cannot be treated in the same way as chemical reactions. Chemical reactions are predetermined and invariable; human functions are dirigible. Those functions which ultimately govern and sustain human activity and determine human character are directed to more or less sharply recognised and chosen ends. It is indeed true that many of the processes which are concerned in the movement of life are, as Mr. Cooley has pointed out, unconscious and seemingly impersonal, such as those which account for the growth of tradition and the variations of language. Nevertheless, as Mr. Cooley himself very excellently shows in his illustration of the growth of a book in its author’s mind, even these unconscious and involuntary processes fall into line with a definitely fixed purpose of the mind.^[6] The problem of sound social integration is not merely an affair of processes operating properly. For human powers may function, at least for a time, in a normal way even while they are being directed to mischievous and perverse ends. Modern Germany supplies an instance of unexampled attention to social processes; but it is not open to question that all this has been directed to a perverse and immoral end, and has (as the event has shown) culminated in catastrophe and confusion. Just so a man’s intellect may operate brilliantly; yet the man himself may be a thief. Psychology may claim that its business is a disinterested study of processes; and the claim is justly made. But the same claim cannot be made for sociology. The sociologist may indeed claim that he too is a scientist; and that his science like every other is empirical and not teleological. But the two claims are not parallel. Psychology deals with an opus operatum, the actual concrete mind as it is; whereas the assumption which underlies all sociology is that it is handling an opus operandum, a work still to be done, the production of a living and wholesome society. The teleological interest is necessarily supreme. This does not mean that sociology has not its empirical aspects; of course, it has; and these aspects are all important for the construction of a sound sociology. But we shall produce a mere torso of sociology if we suppose we can ignore the problem of ends. The relation of psychology to sociology is of much the same character as its relation to education or the relation of physiology to public health.

It is probable, moreover, that the obscuration of this question of ends has been helped by the modern acceptance of the doctrine of progress. This in its turn appears to be mainly due to the application of the principle of evolution to human affairs. We have supposed that because living nature shows a process of development, the life of man is also necessarily governed by a law of predestined progress, from worse to better, from the simple to the more complex. The result of this evolutionary view of human affairs has been to make the study of ends appear impertinent. The ends are already determined; why then trouble ourselves about them? It is true that we do not know whither this vis a tergo is propelling us; the only thing we can do, therefore, is to study the processes by which it works as we see them in operation in men’s minds, whether the single or the mass mind. We shall observe them, duly record them, and contemplate them in a spirit of detachment, without concerning ourselves overmuch with their destination. But it is now too late in the day to suppose that this attitude can be seriously maintained. The area of the margin of human freedom may be a subject of controversy; but it is impossible to take seriously the kind of determinism which denies the possibility of directing human action to deliberately chosen ends. The actual range of our control over our actions may be limited; but within those limits it is very real. And in any case it does not require to be very much to make the evolution hypothesis of very doubtful validity as an interpretation of the whole life of man.^[7]

Sociology must concern itself with ends; and it must do so at its own beginnings. If this means that it has to forfeit its claim to a strictly scientific status, so be it. There is no virtue in replying that the question of ends is an affair of speculation and hypothesis. That is indeed true; but it cannot be helped. We are compelled to speculate concerning ends since there is no other way of reaching a conception of them. And there is no harm in speculation so long as it starts from the soundest available premises, and its conclusions are not hardened into dogma. Sociology will hardly rise above an academic futility until it abandons its obsession to rank as a pure science and makes bold to define however tentatively the goal toward which social processes should be directed. Let it by all means make its surveys and collate its statistics unremittingly; but these things it ought to do and not to leave the other undone.

II

Yet it becomes plain, immediately we begin to discuss this question of ends, that if we exclude definitely religious considerations from the argument, we cannot indicate an end that has the character of a real end, that is, an absolute ultimacy. It is indeed questionable how far even the religious postulate directly provides the conception of an end, except to the comparatively small company of people who are strongly mystical by nature. The Shorter Catechism taught us that the chief end of man was to seek God and to glorify Him for ever, but to most of us this brings not information but bewilderment; and Mr. Kipling’s paradise where the painter “draws the thing as he sees it for the God of things as they are” is attractive but elusive. The truth appears to be that for the multitude of religiously disposed persons, the sense of God becomes effectual for conduct only as it dramatises itself in the form of a social vision or a personal relationship; and the ascendency of Jesus in the Christian tradition is explained by the power He has possessed of inviting that unreserved personal loyalty through which the sense of God assumes reality for common men. Such a phrase as “the glory of God” describes not our knowledge but our ignorance. All the content which can intelligibly be given to it is that there is an ideal end toward which we are called to move. This, however, does not mean that it is barren of immediate effect on conduct. We know that throughout history it has had the power to evoke a supreme disinterestedness in people who have been sensitive to it. It is, of course, akin to what Mr. Benjamin Kidd calls “the emotion of the ideal;” and it is related closely to the characteristic poetic anticipation and hope expressed in such passages as Tennyson’s in which he speaks of the “one far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves.”

But disinterestedness and “the emotion of the ideal,” while they are essential to any kind of healthy social existence afford but slender foundation for a positive social policy. No moral attitude or emotion will carry us far except it be evoked by an ideal which can dramatise itself in terms of a more or less achievable undertaking. We are therefore compelled to relinquish the hope of a definition of absolute social ends, and must be content with something more modest and manageable. We may at least attempt to indicate certain proximate social aims. Even if we cannot hopefully describe the ultimate goal of life, we may reasonably endeavour to answer the question—What do we want our social organisation to produce? Just what results are we to aim at? That some such discussion as this is involved in any fruitful handling of the question of social integration is clear from the fact that the conception of an aim is either implicit or explicit in all attempts to formulate a social polity ever since Aristotle defined the aim of the Republic as the promotion of the good life. But this definition, like Mill’s “greatest good of the greatest number” raises further questions—What is the nature of the good? What is the characteristic note and quality of the good life? This indeed takes us to the very centre of our problem; for at last the controversy between the militarist and the pacifist, the protectionist and the free-trader, the authoritarian and the libertarian, springs from differing conceptions of the good life. This is not to say that either party has worked out a reasoned conviction on the point. Both appear to start from certain instinctive acceptances, determined largely by temperamental variations,—which points to the need of a rigorously rationalistic exploration of this entire region. Mr. Graham Wallace speaks of “the organisation of happiness”; but as he himself perceives, he is speaking in paradox. It seems in any case improbable that our social aims can be defined in terms of an emotional state.

III

A good deal of confusion has been introduced into this subject by a tendency to regard society itself as an end. In much modern thought upon the matter, the individual is conceived as attaining his own end through his due contribution to the life of the group. The extreme development of this view is to be found in the German doctrine of the state, a doctrine which prevails in more or less perfection wherever the Hegelian philosophy has struck its roots.^[8] On this view, the individual has neither function nor end which is not to be expressed in terms of his own personal subordination to the state. He is a cog in the wheel, and no more. The modern dogma of progress has reinforced this view to some extent; as has also the obsession of size, which is one of the by-products of our extended knowledge of the physical universe and which has had the effect of minimising the significance of the single life. But whatever the causes to which this view is attributable, its influence on sociological thought is beyond question. It has been assumed, with varying explicitness, that the supra-personal end which the individual is to serve is to be identified with the social group to which he belongs. It is his appointed purpose to minister to the happiness of the group or to increase its efficiency as a military or economic unit.

(a) It may be urged against this view that the antithesis which it implies between the individual and the group is fallacious. For the group is composed of individuals and it cannot have a conscious end except in the minds of the individuals who compose it. There is a degree of truth in speaking of the “personality” of a group so long as the analogy is not pressed too far. A group may have a common thought and may unite in a collective act; but to say that a group has a definite “personality” of its own is to carry the process of abstraction too far. A group attains to consciousness only in the several minds of its members. Moreover social ends must take shape in individual lives. That the individual should serve a social end is true; it is equally true that the social aim must be achieved in the character and experience of individuals. For if they are not realised in persons, where shall they be realised? If our ultimate social aims do not become effective in the single life, they remain mere abstractions, existing only in a speculative thought and never reaching the point of actuality. But it serves us as little to insist on the converse of this view and to assert that the end of society is the individual. The truth would rather appear to be that the individual is to reach his own end in and through a society which it is his first business to create. Personal self-realisation and social integration will proceed pari passu. The individual and the group will find themselves in each other; the great soul and the great society will arrive together. But from the nature of the case, we must seek the clue to the character of right social aims through a study of personality, and of what is involved in its self-realisation.

(b) A further objection to this view is that it subordinates personality to aims that are limited and sectional. In practice it may make good Germans, but almost certainly it cannot make good men. While it is better for a man to serve the narrowest social group than to serve his self-regard, yet the exclusiveness of the social group as it is identified with the state or the nation is hostile to that increasing social integration which is implied in a self-consistent sociology. The current conceptions of the state and the nation must undergo some revision if they are to be made congruous with a fruitful social polity. The nation represents a stage in the social education of the race, in that discipline whereby the caveman grows into a citizenship of the world; and in no sense can the nation be ethically regarded as constituting an adequate end for the individual, except as the nation in its turn is consciously seeking its own end in the service of the whole.

It is true that men have in the past generally regarded the glory and the power of their particular group as an end which has the right to command their absolute devotion, and have believed that to suffer death in such a cause is the highest conceivable self-realisation. This does indeed represent a much higher ethical plane than that on which a man fights only for his own hand or the tiny circle of his blood kindred. But the fact that this loyalty to his group has had the power to evoke the highest possible sacrifice, does not prove that the glory and the power of the group provides a full and valid end for him as a man. In his character as German or Englishman, it may appear to provide him with an end to which he may properly submit himself without reserve; but it is questionable whether he can do so without some sacrifice of his possibilities and obligations as a man. The propaganda of Germanism produced very efficient and docile Germans; but the records of the war leave us little room to doubt that the process has had a mischievous effect upon their manhood. From the standpoint of an expanding society polity, education should produce individuals who are human before they are national. There is no system of national education which achieves this result; but the ultimate logic of the prevailing educational tradition as we see it in the German conduct of the war should provoke serious misgivings and minister to a change of heart in those persons who direct the policies of public education.

(c) It is worth observing in this connection that even in Germany the Germanic propaganda had to trick itself out in a pseudo-universal jargon. It had to say large-sounding things about a Kultur-mission to the world in order to validate itself in the eyes of the German people. The claim implied in the Kultur-mission as it was commonly expounded is so preposterous as to be self-refuting to a normal mind; but this systematic diffusion of the idea proves that man has reached a point where the power and wealth of a particular group is no longer able by itself to evoke an effectual response in the individuals who compose the group. The fact is that civilised mankind is slowly learning to think in universal terms. Its social grasp is already faintly embracing the whole world.

This circumstance tends to simplify the sociologist’s task very materially. While the application of the polity which he evolves will require to take account of the peculiar traditions and institutions of different groups, he will be free to work out his polity in terms which are independent of the present exclusive and conflicting aims of the groups which compose the world of man. He will state the ultimate problems of society in Germany in the same terms as he will state those in America; for he will necessarily be dealing with the one factor which is common to both. There cannot be a distinctive social science in Germany and another in America, differing from one another in essentials and both at the same time being true. There will be endless variety in the methods by which social principles are applied by different groups; for we cannot write off the past of a people and the institutions in which its history is embodied. Yet there can be no true sociology in England or in Germany unless its postulates are equally valid in America. In other words these postulates must be drawn from a disinterested study of personality. They will not concern themselves with the welfare of a particular group, in whatever terms that welfare may be defined. But they will be concerned with the good of the world of groups because they are derived from the one fact which is common to and underlies them all, and which, despite conflicting aims still binds human groups together in a permanent unity, namely, personality.

IV

The aims of our social polity must, therefore, be defined congruously with the nature of personality; and the corresponding social processes must validate themselves by bringing to those whom they affect, the sense of movement towards a real and recognisable personal good. It does not require that all the individuals composing a society should organise their common life with the conscious and deliberate aim of personal self-realisation; but it is certain that the processes of a genuine social integration will be accompanied by a certain growing emotional satisfaction in the persons concerned. It is generally assumed that this emotional satisfaction is to be described as happiness; but it is probably something deeper and more organic than the state which this word connotes. Professor Dewey says that “to find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key of happiness.”^[9] This is, of course, true so far as it goes; but it is symptomatic of the inadequate analysis which this point generally receives. Obviously there are possibilities of self-realisation and personal satisfaction far beyond the attainment which Professor Dewey indicates in this sentence. We might, perhaps, find a better definition of the emotional state which we should require our process of social development to produce, in the New Testament use of the word joy. There the word is clearly associated with an emotional state consequent upon a sense of accomplishment or discovery. The golfer experiences it for a passing moment after a completely successful drive from the tee. The artist knows it more durably as he puts the finishing touch to what he believes to be his masterpiece. Gibbon had it (not without a large tincture of self-admiration) on the memorable evening on which he finished the “Decline and Fall.” It is the condition which is described by the word “fruition;”^[10] the inward reaction evoked by the sense of arrival, of fulfilment, and of course—derivatively—of being surely on the way. It comes to a man when he knows he is on the road to personal completeness.

It is upon the question of what constitutes personal completeness that we have to reach some kind of conclusion if our sociological thinking is to be fruitful and if we are to have the proper tests to apply to our social programmes. Obviously the society we want to produce is one which will provide the conditions under which every man may rise to the full stature of his manhood. But what is the full-grown man? Apparently the only person in the modern world who has possessed a definite and vivid conception of the full-grown man is Nietzsche. But Nietzsche’s doctrine is ruled out by our democratic hypothesis. He has told us that mankind falls into two broad classes of master and slave, and though he recognises a considerable hierarchy of social grades, he sees, nevertheless, at the one end the ruling class, and at the other “the class of man who thrives best when he is looked after and closely observed, the man who is happy to serve not because he must, but because he is what he is, the man uncorrupted by political and religious lies concerning liberty, equality and fraternity, who is half conscious of the abyss which separates him from his superiors, and who is happiest when he is performing those acts which are not beyond his limitations.”^[11] Obviously the only kind of society possible on the Nietzschean terms is an armed peace between supermen and “slave morality” for the rest. The will to power soon or late issues in anarchy. The strength of the position of Nietzsche lies in the theoretic justification it provides for the native human bias which leads to the quest of personal ascendency, and the struggle for possession. The result of this tendency has been the constant subordination and exploitation of the weak by the strong, and a ceaseless scrimmage among the strong in which the weak are the pawns; and if this struggle has not brought about the Nietzschean equilibrium, it is due, presumably, to the enervating influence of Christianity. Yet, here, in this self-regarding bias we have the original source of all our social chaos; but the disorder is not to be overcome by inhibiting this impulse. It is sometimes supposed that human nature is incurably and permanently self-regarding and anarchic; but this is not true. It is indeed true that human nature does take easily to the practice of self-assertion as against others; this is the penalty of our inheritance from the “ape and the tiger.” But it is mere folly to suppose that man has to carry this sorrowful entail in perpetuity. It is fastened on him largely by reason of the external circumstances of his life, a vicious social heredity which has put a premium upon power and pushfulness, and an atmosphere of competition in which capacity and cunning win the prize. It is, however, not impossible to communicate to men a social vision which is able to divert the natural energies of the human spirit into more generous channels. This, did they but know it, is the peculiar vocation of the preacher and the teacher.

Mr. Bertrand Russell has recently laid just emphasis upon the supremacy of impulse in determining human conduct; and has pointed out the distinction between impulses which make for life and those which make for death. William Blake had a somewhat similar view. What Blake in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” calls energy appears to be that vital stress which expresses itself in our impulses, and which in the form of “poetic” energy is the source of creative art. In Blake’s psychology, this energy only works out healthily and fruitfully when it is co-ordinated on the one side with Reason and on the other by Desire; and he traces our human troubles to an undue ascendency of one or other of these two balancing principles. When Reason prevails over Desire, it imposes disastrous restraint upon energy; but when the tables are turned, the ascendency of Desire leads to the “vegetated life.” Blake’s analysis has much to commend it; and it appears to supply the necessary complement to Mr. Russell’s. For our impulses, whether they make for life or death are the same impulses—the difference in their result springing from a difference in their direction, and in the conditions under which they operate.

The old psychological analysis of the mind into will, intellect, affections, and so forth has served its turn; and for purposes of social building we must betake ourselves rather to an analysis of Blake’s energy or Mr. Russell’s impulses. M. Bergson has shown us how the “elan vitale” has in the course of its onward march split up again and again, and in so doing has set afoot new lines of development and variation; and we have for result the infinite wealth of plant and animal form which fills the earth. The primitive urge of life was seemingly a bundle of tendencies, which were released, one at this point, and another at that, under the stress of the circumstances encountered on the way. In the same way the energy, the vital stress of personality is an organic complex of impulses, each of which has released and shaped itself conformably to the conditions in which the human spirit has found itself in the process of growth. In this complex of impulses, it is possible to discern three main strands:

1. The Impulse of Self-preservation. This has to do with the desire and purpose to maintain life; and its primitive form was determined by the necessity of procuring food, clothing and shelter. Its characteristic activity was that of discovering and adapting the means which were available to the end of sustaining life; and out of this grew agriculture, weaving, housebuilding and a range of operations which grew in number and elaboration as the requirements of life increased. Here is the origin of what Mr. Veblen has called the Instinct of Workmanship.

2. The Impulse of Reproduction. This in its elemental form expresses itself in the begetting of children. But as man became more familiar with the objects round about him, in the course of handling them for the ends of self-preservation, this impulse became associated with the instinct of workmanship, and man began to attempt to reproduce himself in other media than his flesh. He came to do certain work which was not required by the exigencies of his physical subsistence; and this work he did—as it were—for the joy of doing it. He attempted to express himself upon such materials as were capable of receiving his impress; and his delight in his handicraft became the beginning of Art. Presently he learnt to set line and colour and sound in combinations that pleased him, and in which he was conscious of the joy of fatherhood. This is the Instinct of Creativeness. It is not always perceived that there is a very profound distinction to be drawn between the workmanlike and the creative activities. Miss Helen Marot appears to assume (in her book The Creative Impulse in Industry), that a democratic form of co-operation, and an understanding of industrial processes will satisfy the creative instinct in industry. It is difficult to see how this can happen under the conditions of the modern large-scale machine industry. Miss Marot rightly insists that the creative impulse is not merely an affair of individual self-expression. Nevertheless, it is only possible to a group when the group is comparatively small, and every member is in active touch with the whole process. The instinct of workmanship is of a routine productive character, the instinct of creativeness is original and reproductive. Nothing on this earth can make our highly specialised machine processes into opportunities of self-expression. This, however, does not mean that the machine industry has no place in the future social order.

3. The Impulse of Association.—Man has always lived with men; and there is perhaps nothing so distinctive of human nature as its faculty for association. We are so made that we only find ourselves and each other as we live together in societies, that we only find ourselves as we find one another. The exchanges of love and friendship, the riches of fellowship—these are the most fruitful experiences of life. “We are members of one another”; and are fulfilled in each other. Our mutual need has released in us the Instinct of Sociability.

The weakness of this kind of analysis is that it appears to untwine threads that cannot be untwined in practice and never are separated in experience. Human instincts do not operate independently; they blend into each other continuously and inextricably in countless ways. We have seen how the reproductive impulse fused with the instinct of workmanship into an impulse toward creative art. But the debt has been repaid in the introduction of requirements of beauty into the exercise of workmanship. In the era of craftsmanship, the two impulses were very intimately blended, workmanship and creativeness going hand in hand in the erection of stately minsters, or in the making of harness for the squire’s horses. It is due to the development of the machine that these two impulses have been so widely parted in our time, to the immense injury of both; and it is one of the tasks, perhaps the chief of the tasks, facing us in the future to restore them to something of their old-time intimacy. Of this restoration, the great modern prophet is William Morris, who saw hope neither for the worker nor for the artist except in a closer association of industry with beauty, and who laid the foundation of this revived association by his own pioneer work as a house-decorator. This does not require, as some suppose, the scrapping of the machine industry, even though that were possible; it only requires that we understand the true place of the machine industry and put it there. Similarly, the instinct of sociability coalesced with those of workmanship and creativeness. The signal instance of this combination is to be found in the spirit of the mediÆval Guilds; but there are other instances in plenty. Most of the great human achievements in thought, religion and art, have had a social origin, in schools of philosophers and prophets, in groups of artists and the like, and conversely new departures in thought, religion and art have become the foci of new groups.

Of all this the moral would seem to be that we must treat the energy of personality, its characteristic outgoing, as a single undivided indivisible stream; yet we must recognise it also as a stream containing a certain range of ingredients. Therefore, what we shall require of our ideal society is that it shall generate an atmosphere and an environment in which the constituent ingredients of personal energy shall find opportunity of full, co-ordinated and parallel development. It will be a society in which the instinct of workmanship, creativeness and sociability will grow side by side and hand in hand toward “the perfect man, of the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.”

Of this society then, we may say, that its marks will be that first every man shall have the opportunity of a secure and sufficient physical subsistence, second, that its work will press upward to the plane of art, and that its sociability will grow into vital and purposeful fellowship. By these tests we shall judge the soundness of democratic progress.

Our analysis has hitherto taken account only of the common man without reference to natural divergencies of genius or capacity. Professor Geddes has lately been emphasising Comte’s doctrine of history as an interplay of the temporal and spiritual powers, and his classification of the four Social types—Chiefs, People, Emotionals and Intellectuals. Mr. Arnold Bennett found men on the Clyde sorting themselves out into Organisers, Workers, Energisers and Initiators, which classification, as Professor Geddes justly points out, corresponds closely to Comte’s. These types, however, reduce themselves to two, namely those chiefly animated by the impulse of action, and those chiefly animated by the impulse of reflection. Of course, these types shade off imperceptibly into one another, because the impulses which give them their peculiar colour are native to and present in universal human nature. And while it is certain that nature will see to it that mankind will be delivered from the doom of a dead uniformity, it is nevertheless necessary that we should aim at the full development of both the active and reflective impulses in every man. Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets! Hitherto, we have considered man as actuated mainly by the impulse of action; but the release and development of the impulse of reflection is essential to the growth of society. For the experience which is the sequel of action is condemned to sterility except it be reflected upon. Reflection upon experience is the appointed guide of further action. We must, therefore, add to our tests of sound democratic progress, a fourth, namely, that it shall be of a kind to stimulate and encourage reflection. It must, that is, include a method of education whereby every man shall as far as possible become capable of independent thought and sound judgment.

Out of all this emerges immediately one certain conclusion. The kind of society which encourages creative self-expression, independent judgment and a living expanding fellowship must necessarily be conceived and created in freedom. For to these essential human impulses, freedom is the very breath of life. The initial problem of sociology is, therefore, the achievement of freedom; upon that foundation, and that only, can it build for eternity.