INTELLIGENCE AS FORESIGHT—A TENTATIVE PROCESS—A PHASE OF THE SOCIAL PROCESS—GROUP INTELLIGENCE—INTELLIGENT PROCESS INCLUDES THE WHOLE MIND—ITS DRAMATIC CHARACTER—RELATION TO DRAMATIC LITERATURE—MODERN ENLARGEMENT OF INTELLIGENT PROCESS

The test of intelligence is the power to act successfully in new situations. We judge a man to be intelligent when we see that in going through the world he is not guided merely by routine or second-hand ideas, but that when he meets a fresh difficulty he thinks out a fresh line of action appropriate to it, which is justified by its success. We value the faculty because it does succeed, because in the changing world of human life we feel a constant need for it. In animal existence, where situations repeat themselves day after day, and generation after generation, with practical uniformity, a successful method of behavior may be worked out by unintelligent adaptation, and may become fixed in instinct or habit, but the power to deal effectively with intricate and shifting forces belongs to intelligence alone.

It is, then, essentially a kind of foresight, a mental reaction that anticipates the operation of the forces at work and is prepared in advance to adjust itself to them. How is this possible when the situation is a new one whose working cannot have been observed in the past?

The answer is that the situation is new only as a whole, and that it always has elements whose operation is familiar. Intelligence is the power to anticipate how these elements will work in a novel combination: it is a power of grasp, of synthesis, of constructive vision.^[75]

It does not dispense with experience. A man who can take hold of a new undertaking and make it go will commonly be a man who has prepared himself by previous undertakings of a similar character: the more pertinent experience he has had the better. If he is opening a business agency in a strange city he will require a general acquaintance with the business, such as he might gain at the home office, and will do well also to learn all he can in advance about the city into which he goes. But beyond this he will need the power to take a fresh, understanding view of the situation as he actually finds it, the state of the market, the people with whom he deals and the like, so as to perceive their probable working in relation to his own designs.

Intelligence, then, is based on memories, but makes a free and constructive use of these, as distinguished from a mechanical use. By an act of mental synthesis it grasps the new combination as a going whole and foresees how it must work. It apprehends life through an inner organizing process of its own, corresponding to the outward process which it needs to interpret, but working in advance of the latter and anticipating the outcome.

You might say that memory supplies us with a thousand motion-picture films showing what has happened in given sets of circumstances in the past. Now, when a new set of circumstances occurs the unintelligent mind picks out a film that shows something in common with it and, expecting a repetition of that film, guides its course accordingly. The intelligent mind, however, surveying many old films, is content with none of them, but by a creative synthesis imagines a new film answering more closely to the new situation, and foreshowing more nearly what will happen. It is a work of art, depicting what never was on sea or land, yet more like the truth than anything actually experienced.

I conceive that no mechanical theory of intelligence can be other than illusive. It is essentially a process of dealing with the unknown, of discovery. After its operations have taken place they may, perhaps, be formulated; but they can be predicted in advance only by the parallel operation of another intelligence. Behavior which can be formulated in advance is not, in any high sense, intelligent.

Even the intelligence, however, works by a tentative method; it has to feel its way. Its superiority lies in the fewness and effectiveness of its experiments. Our mental staging of what is about to happen is almost never completely true, but it approaches the truth, in proportion as we are intelligent, so that our action comes somewhere near success, and we can the more easily make the necessary corrections. Napoleon did not always foresee how military operations would work out, but his prevision was so much more nearly correct than that of other generals that his rapid and sure experiments led to almost certain victory. In a similar manner Darwin felt his way among observations and hypotheses, proving all things and holding fast what was good, going slowly but surely up a road where others could make no headway at all. It is the same, I believe, with composers, sculptors, painters, and poets: their occasionally rapid accomplishment is the fruit of a long discipline in trial and error.

This selection and organization in the intelligent mind is also a participation in the social process. As the mental and the social are merely phases of the same life, this hardly needs proof, but an illustration will do no harm.

Suppose, then, I am considering whether to send my son away from home to a certain college. Here is a problem for my intelligence, and it is also a social problem, a situation in a drama wherein my son and I and others are characters, my aim being to understand and guide its development so that it may issue as I wish. I bring before my mind all that I have been able to learn about the teachers at the college, the traditions and surrounding influences, as well as the disposition and previous history of the boy, striving all the time to see how things will develop if I do send him, and how this will be related to my own wishes for his welfare. The better I can do this the more likely I am to act successfully in the premises. The whole procedure is a staging in my mind of a scene in the life of society.

The process that goes on in a case like this is the work not only of my own private mind but of a social group. My information comes to me through other people, and they share in forming my ideas. Quite probably I discuss the matter with my friends; certainly with my wife: it may be matter for a family council. Intelligence works through a social process.

It is easy, then, to pass from what seems to be an act of merely private intelligence through a series of steps by which it becomes distinctly public or societal. The deliberations of a family council differ only in continuity of organization from those of a wide nation, with newspapers, legislatures, and an ancient constitution. There is nothing exclusively individual about intelligence. It is part of our social heritage, inseparably bound up with communication and discussion, and has always functioned for that common life which embraces the most cogent interests of the individual. The groups in which men have lived—the family, the tribe, the clan, the secret society, the village community, and so on to the multiform associations of our own time—have had a public intelligence, working itself out through discussion and tradition, and illuminating more or less the situations and endeavors of the group.

It is, indeed, a chief function of the institutions of society to provide an organization on the basis of which public intelligence may work effectively. They preserve the results of past experiment and accumulate them about the principal lines of public endeavor, so that intelligence working along these lines may use them. They supply also specialized symbols, traditions, methods of discussion and decision, for industry, science, literature, government, art, philosophy and other departments of life. The growth of intelligence and the growth of a differentiated social system are inseparable.

The movement of this larger or public intelligence is a social process of somewhat the same character as the less conscious processes. It is tentative, adaptive, has periods of conflict and of compromise, and results in progressive organization. The difference is just that it is more intelligent; that thinking and planning and forecasting play a greater part in it, and that there is not so much waste and misdirection. Its development requires a special psychological method, including the initiation of ideas, discussion, modification, and decision; which of course is absent on the lower plane of life.

It is essential, if we are to have a public intelligence, that individuals should identify themselves with the public organism and think from that point of view. If there is no consciousness of the whole its experiments and adaptations cannot be truly intelligent, because, as a whole, it makes no mental synthesis and prevision. A society of “economic men,” that is, of men who regarded all questions only from the standpoint of their individual pecuniary loss or gain, could never be an intelligent whole. If it worked well, as economists formerly believed that it would, this would be an unforeseen and unintended result, not a direct work of intelligence. In fact, during the nineteenth century England and America went largely upon the theory that a general intelligence and control were unnecessary in the economic sphere—with the result that all competent minds now perceive the theory to be false.

On the other hand, the act of larger intelligence need not take place all at once or in the mind of only one individual. It is usually co-operative and cumulative, the work of many individuals, all of them, in some measure, thinking from the point of view of the whole and building up their ideas and endeavors in a continuing structure.

Thus it may be said that in all modern nations the political life is partly intelligent, because none of them, perhaps, is without a line of patriots who, generation after generation, identify their thoughts with the state, discuss aims and methods with one another, and maintain a tradition of rational policy. It is so with any organism which attracts the allegiance of a continuous group. The church, as a whole and in its several branches, has a corporate intelligence maintained in this way, and so have the various sciences; also, in a measure, political parties, the fine arts, and the more enduring forms of industrial organization. Human nature likes to merge itself in great wholes, and many a corporation is served, better, perhaps, than it deserves, by men who identify their spirits with it.

It would be a false conception of intelligence to regard it as something apart from sentiment and passion. It is, rather, an organization of the whole working of the mind, a development at the top of a process which remains an interrelated whole. This is true of its individual aspect; for our sentiments and passions furnish in great part the premises with which intelligence works; they are the pigments, so to speak, with which we paint the picture. And so with the collective aspect; discussion is far more than an interchange of ideas; it is also an interaction of feelings, which are sometimes conveyed by words and sometimes by gesture, tones, glances of the eye, and by all sorts of deeds. The obscure impulses that pass from man to man in this way have quite as much to do with the building of the collective mind as has explicit reasoning. The whole psychic current works itself up by complex interaction and synthesis. And the power of collective intelligence in a people is not to be measured by dialectic faculty alone; it rests quite as much upon those qualities of sense and character which underlie insight, judgment, and belief. Intelligence, in the fullest sense, is wisdom, and wisdom draws upon every resource of the mind.

There is no way of telling whether a people is capable of intelligent self-direction except by observing that they practise it. It may be true that certain races or stocks do not have political capacity in sufficient measure to meet the needs of modern organization, and will fail to produce stable and efficient societies. It is a matter of experiment, and our more optimistic theories may prove to be unsound.

For similar reasons no dividing-line can be drawn between what is intelligent and what is ethical, however clearly they may be separated in particular cases. That is, the intelligent view of situations is a synthetic view which, if it is only synthetic enough, embracing in one whole all the human interests at stake, tends to become an ethical view. Righteousness is the completest intelligence in action, and we are constantly finding that what appears intelligent to a narrow state of mind is quite the opposite when our imaginations expand to take in a wider range of life. There can be an unmoral kind of intelligence which is very keen in its way, as, for that matter, there can be an unintelligent kind of morality which is very conscientious in its way; but the two tend to coincide as they become more complete. The question of our higher development is all one question, of which the intellectual and moral sides are aspects. We get on by forming intelligent ideals of right, which are imaginative reconstructions and anticipations of life, based upon experience. And in trying to realize these ideals we initiate a new phase of the social process, which goes on through the usual interactions to a fresh synthesis.

It seems that intelligence, as applied to social life, is essentially dramatic in character. That is, it deals with men in all their human complexity, and is required to forecast how they will act in relation to one another and how the situation as a whole will work out. The most intelligent man is he who can most adequately dramatize that part of the social process with which he has to deal. If he is a social worker dealing with a family he needs not only to sympathize with the members individually, but to see them as a group in living interaction with one another and with the neighbors, so that he may know how any fresh influence he may bring to bear will actually work. If he is the labor-manager of a factory he must have insight to see the play of motive going on among the men, their attitude toward their work, toward the foreman and toward the “office,” the whole group-psychology of the situation. In the same way a business man must see a proposed transaction as a living, moving whole, with all the parties to it in their true human characters. I remember talking with an investigator for one of the great commercial agencies who told me that in forming his judgment of the reliability of a merchant he made a practice, after an interview with him, of imagining him in various critical situations and picturing to himself how such a man would behave—of dramatizing him. I think that we all do this in forming our judgments of people.

Or what is the stock-market but a continuous drama, successful participation in which depends upon the power to apprehend some phase of it as a moving whole and foresee its tendency? And so with statesmanship; the precise knowledge of history or statistics will always and rightly be subordinate to the higher faculty of inspired social imagination.

The literary drama, including fiction and whatever other forms have a dramatic character, may be regarded as intelligence striving to interpret the social process in art. It aims to present in comprehensible form some phase of that cyclical movement of life which otherwise is apt to seem unintelligible.

When the curtain rises we perceive, first of all, a number of persons, charged with character and reciprocal tendency, each one standing for something and all together constituting a dynamic situation. We feel ourselves in the stress of life; conflict is implicit and expectation aroused. The play proceeds and the forces begin to work themselves out; there are interactions, mutual incitements and adjustments, with a development both of persons and of the situation at large. At length the interacting powers arrange themselves more or less distinctly about a central question, and presently ensues that struggle for which our expectation is strung; some decisive clash of human forces, which satisfies our need to see the thing fought out, and releases our excitement, to subside, perhaps, in reflection. And presently we have the dénouement, a final and reconciling situation, a completer and more stable organization of the forces that were implicit in the beginning.

Conflict is the crisis of drama, as it is of the social process, and there is hardly any great literature, whether dramatic in form or not, which is not a literature of conflict. What would be left of the Bible if you took away all that is inspired by it; from the Psalms, for instance, all echoes of the struggles of Israel with other nations, of upper with lower classes, or of the warring impulses within the mind of the singer? The power of the story of Jesus centres about his faith, his courage, his lonely struggle, his apparent failure, which is yet felt to be a real success—the Cross. And so one might take Homer, Dante, Shakespeare’s tragedies, Faust, as well as a thousand works of the second order, finding conflict at the heart of all. Without this we are not greatly moved.

Each type of society has particular forms of the drama setting forth what it apprehends as most significant in its own life. Savages dramatize battle and the chase, while plays of our own time depict the conflict of industrial classes, of old ideas and conventions with new ones, and of the individual with circumstances. The love game between the sexes—a sort of conflict however you look at it—is of perennial interest.

Forms like the play and the novel should be the most effective agents of social discussion; and, in fact, the more searching, in a social and moral sense, are the questions to be discussed, the more these forms are in demand. In an ordinary political campaign, where there is little at issue beyond a personal choice of candidates or some clash of pecuniary interests, the usual appeals through newspaper editorials, interviews, and speeches may suffice. But when people begin to be exercised about really fundamental matters, such as the ethics of marriage, the ascendancy of one social class over another, the contact of races or the significance of vice and crime, they show a need to see these matters through novels and plays. The immense vogue of literature of this sort in recent years is good democracy; in no other way is it possible to present such questions with so much of living truth, and yet so simplified as to make a real impression.

In recent time there has been a great enlargement of the intelligent process, which will doubtless continue in the future. As regards mechanism, this is based on the extension and improvement of communication, of printing, telegraphy, rapid travel, illustration, and the like. These disseminate information and make a wider and quicker discussion possible. At the same time there appears to have been an advance in the power of organized intelligence to interpret life and bring sound judgment to bear upon actual situations. No one would dispute the truth of this as regards our dealings with the material world, nor is there much doubt that it is in some degree true in the sphere of social relations. We understand better how life works and should be able to impress a more rational and humane character on the whole process. At any rate this, I suppose, is what we are all striving for.

But no achievement of this sort is likely to affect the preponderance of the unintelligible. You might liken society to a party of men with lanterns making their way by night through an immeasurable forest. The light which the lanterns throw about each individual, and about the party as a whole, showing them how to guide their immediate steps, may increase indefinitely, illuminating more clearly a larger area; but there will always remain, probably, the plutonian wilderness beyond.

DIVERSIFICATION IN SPECIAL GROUPS—DEMOCRACY VERSUS UNIFORMITY—FREEDOM OF PROPOSAL AND DISCUSSION—THE VALUE OF PARTIAL ISOLATION—IMMIGRATION—ORGANIC SELECTION OF IDEAS—IDEAS THAT DO NOT FIT—TRANSIENT ERRORS—THE HARMFUL NOT ALWAYS ELIMINATED—THE STRUGGLE OF IDEAS IN A TIME OF TRANSITION—GETTING DOWN TO PRINCIPLES

The movement of intelligence in large social wholes is an intricate organic process, in which many types of men participate, and also many traditions and environments under the influence of which these types of men are formed. From these diverse points of view come forecasts and experiments in various directions, accompanied by a general process of discussion in which all points of view are modified and a fresh synthesis is worked out. Thus we think our way along from one stage to another.

Accordingly, every group needs to have what we call in the individual “a fertile mind”; so that, as new situations arise, a goodly number of intelligent ideas may spring up to meet them, out of which the best lines of action may be evolved through the usual methods of discussion and trial. Thus, if a group of boys have to camp in a rocky place where no tent-stakes can be driven, their success in putting up the tent will depend upon having among their number those whose ingenuity or experience will suggest good plans for using stones or logs instead of stakes.

We need, then, to encourage the growth of special lines of tradition and association in order that we may have expert guidance. So biologists may suggest plans for improving the breed of animals and the quality and yield of crops, bankers schemes of finance, and men trained in the labor movement methods of conciliation. We cannot expect to reach high levels of intelligence except through the medium of functional groups which, by some adequate process of selection and training have come to represent as nearly as may be the highest attainable faculty in a given direction. These groups must be small, because there must be many of them and because the members must be specially qualified; but there is nothing undemocratic in them. Indeed the more democratic they are, that is, the more selection is based on fair play and equal opportunity, the more efficient they should be. It is essential, however, that they should have a continuous organization, making possible a group spirit and a regular development through tradition and discussion. There is no reason why democracy should not express itself through such groups at least as successfully as any other form of society.

Indeed few things are more obstructive of the understanding and development of democracy than the popular idea of it as a uniform mass of individuals without lasting group distinctions. If it is to work well it must become differentiated into functional parts, although admission to these, after suitable training, must be kept open. The conception of a vast, level proletariat, which is to work out a uniform social system on the principle of the greatest good to the greatest number is not only repellent to all who look toward a richly diversified culture, but is far from according with the probable development of democracy. Democracy is primarily an increase of consciousness and personal choice in the social system, which cannot take place except through the growth of diversity. The higher organic life is based upon systematic differentiation, and if differences are functional and adaptive the more we have of them the better. If our democracy is somewhat uniform, this is a defect which time, let us hope, will remedy.

I believe in democracy, but not in the philosophy by which it has often been justified. It appeals to me as on the whole the best means of enfranchising the human spirit and giving sway to those tendencies and persons which, being truly strong in a higher sense, are fit to prevail. I expect that a real democracy will prove to be a true aristocracy, in which leadership will fall to those fit by nature and training to exercise it, though I trust also to the sense and sentiment of the masses. I doubt whether God is equally represented in all men, as some maintain, though I believe that the men who represent him more than others are as likely to be found in a lower social class as in a higher.

The encouragement of recognized lines of special thought is by no means sufficient. It is equally important that we have the utmost freedom of proposal and discussion for projects originating in unforeseen and unaccredited quarters. The specialist, whether lawyer, economist, biologist, business man, minister, socialist, anarchist, or what-not, is, after all, likely to be an expression of what has already been worked out, an organ of the institution, not confronting the new situation in the naïve and unbiased manner which may give value to the views of people of inferior training.

And, moreover, fruitful originality may come quite as much from urgent contact with the situation as from more general knowledge. Workmen in the shop have suggested innumerable improvements which the designer in his office would never have thought of; and practicable ideas of economic and social betterment originate largely with those who have most reason to feel the wrong of the actual condition of things. At any rate their point of view is essential to the formulation of a good plan, and should have every facility to impress itself upon the general process of thought.

The question of free speech is surrounded by a kind of illusion, as a result of which we think of it as a matter that was important in the past, and still is, perhaps, in other circles of society, but is not so in our own environment. We are confident, if we think of the matter at all, that we are not interfering with free speech, nor are any of those other liberal-minded people our friends and associates.

But this is what people have always believed. We know how humane and broad-minded the Emperor Marcus Aurelius was, and also how he regretted the turbulence of the Christians and the severity he felt compelled to use toward them—the same occurrences which have come down to us in the Christian tradition as martyrdoms. Torquemada, of the Spanish Inquisition, was a humane and liberal-minded man in his own view and that of his associates, and so were the burners of witches, the German officials in Belgium, and indeed nearly all of those we look upon as persecutors.

The plain truth is that we are all engaged with more or less energy in endeavoring to force upon others those modes of thought and behavior which we, as a result of our habit and environment, have come to look upon as decent and necessary. This is all that Torquemada did, and we, as I say, are doing no less. The main difference is that we have become more humane in our methods of suppression, and even somewhat aware, vaguely and intermittently, of the illusion of which I speak, so that we are inclined to admit, especially in matters remote from ourselves, the importance of insisting upon freedom of speech.

It is indeed a matter for eternal vigilance and courage, not only in resisting the unconscious encroachments of others but in keeping our own minds open and tolerant. The question is a very real one in American universities, where ideas that shock prevalent habits of thought can hardly be advocated without resisting social and academic pressure, and, perhaps, endangering one’s position, or advancement that might otherwise be expected. This was true thirty or forty years ago as regards the doctrine of evolution; it was true quite recently as regards socialism; it is true now of other social and economic heresies, such as birth-control, pacifism, or what-not, that in time may become entirely respectable.

The need of tolerance has been greatly increased by the rise of a social system which aims to be intelligent, recognizes change as rational, and seeks to guide it by discussion. Under an older régime, as in the Middle Ages, the prevalent doctrine was that there could be but one right way of thinking and that others must be suppressed. And in a society not organized for discussion there was more truth in this than the modern reader of history is apt to admit. A thousand years ago freedom of religious teaching, for example, would probably have resulted in doctrinal and moral anarchy. Innumerable conflicting sects would have sprung up, and there was no general organization of thought vigorous enough to keep them within limits or maintain a voluntary unity. In this, as in many other fields, we can dispense with a compulsory discipline because we have developed one which is spontaneous: formerly, if there was to be a moral whole it had to be authoritative. Even now this is more or less true of unenlightened populations, and it is only along with a campaign for enlightenment that we can safely demand freedom of speech.

It is essential to the intelligent conduct of society that radical groups, however small and unpopular, should develop and express their views. Their proposals do good by forcing the discussion of principles and so leading to an illumination otherwise impossible. The large and moderate parties have a conforming tendency and usually differ but little in principles, if indeed they are conscious of these at all. But the radical programme is a challenge to thought, and can hardly fail to be educative. For some time past the Socialists have been of the utmost service in this way, and round their searching theories of human betterment discussion has largely centred. I have often been impressed by their value as a factor in clarifying the minds of college students. Such theories are like the occupation of an advanced post by a detachment of an army: they push forward the line of battle even if the position occupied does not, in the long run, prove tenable. We easily overlook the fact that an honest project is seldom wholly wrong, and that even if it is there may be profit in discussing it.

The value of partial isolation as a factor in social intelligence is not often recognized in a democracy, where, under the sway of the brotherhood idea, we commonly assume that we cannot see too much of one another. But if we are to have a rich organization of thought, including many types of men, each good of its kind, we must have a corresponding diversity of environments in which these types of men may get their nurture. The culture of individuality, the need of which we are beginning to recognize, cannot go far except as we also foster distinctive groups. We need many kinds of family, of school, of church, of community, of occupational and culture associations, each with a tradition and spirit of its own.

There is much to be said in favor of our schools and universities entering heartily into the lives of the communities that surround them; but if the communities are of a spirit hostile or indifferent to culture they may, and partly do, submerge the latter in their own barbarism. The democratization of higher traditions must be on a plane of militant leadership, not of concession, or it is pernicious. Better a real culture, though in monasteries, than a general vulgarization.

The same considerations may serve to qualify our democratic criticism of hereditary wealth and of the class differences based upon it. The man with an inherited competence is in a position to separate himself from the rush of competition enough to make a fresh estimate of things, and to use his independence as a fulcrum for starting a new movement. No doubt the great majority fail to do this; it requires other qualifications than pecuniary; still, much fruitful initiative in science, art, literature and social reform has in fact been supplied by people having this advantage, and until we provide for leisure and independence in some other way the argument for hereditary wealth will have force. In the same way the finest ideals of life and conduct—as distinguished, possibly, from the highest ideals—have often been the tradition of an upper class, upon which their continuance depended. If we are to dispense with upper classes we must at the same time provide for continuous culture groups of a more democratic sort.

It is much the same with national variation as with that of individuals and groups. Bagehot, in the earliest and perhaps the ablest attempt to apply Darwinism to society, pointed out that “all great nations have been prepared in privacy and in secret. They have been composed far away from all distraction. Greece, Rome, Judea, were framed each by itself, and the antipathy of each to men of different race and different speech is one of their most marked peculiarities, and quite their strongest common property.”^[76] In modern life, however, as nations come to share consciously and with good-will in a common organic life, this differentiation should not be one of isolation or antipathy, but of pride in a distinctive contribution to the higher life of the world. I need hardly add that the independence and individuality of small nations—which has seemed to be threatened—is essential to the general good.

Immigration is another topic that might well be considered from the standpoint of variety of ideas. We need as many kinds of people as possible, provided they are good kinds, because their various temperaments and capacities enrich our life. This seems true biologically, as regards diversity of natural stocks, and applies also to the ideals and habits of thought that immigrants bring with them. Our self-esteem naturally depreciates these contributions, but it is fairly clear that after a long course of pioneer life and crude industrialism we are in a position to profit by culture elements that even the peasantry of an older civilization may supply. The Slavs, Italians, Jews, and others who have recently come to America in such numbers have many things to learn from us, but beyond doubt they have also much to teach.

Certainly it is a mistake to attempt to suppress foreign customs or languages by any kind of coercion. It is true that a common language, at least, is necessary to assimilation, but this will come naturally if our social attitude is hospitable and our schools efficient. Moreover, a too sudden or compulsory break with the past is a bad thing, impairing self-respect and stability of character. Those who cherish what is best in the old life will make all the better members of the new. Such trouble as we have had with our immigrants, in regard to assimilation, is almost negligible, compared with the complete failure of harsher methods in Europe.

The larger discussion involves a struggle for survival among innumerable ideas, springing from the innumerable diversities of person, class, and situation. One naturally inquires what causes some of these ideas to survive and prevail rather than others. What makes the success or failure of a principle or a project?

Some writers will answer this question for us by pointing to specific factors which they think are decisive—though they by no means agree as to what these are—but I take it that the determining agent is nothing less than the total situation, which we must grasp as a whole in order to see the trend of things. The life of an idea depends upon the degree and manner of its working in the actual complex state of the mind of the people, consisting largely of impulses, habits, and traditions whose sources are remote and obscure. Take, for example, the change in our ideas regarding the functions and problems of women, indicated by the contrast between the literature of the nineteenth century and that of to-day. Certain reasons can be given for it, such as the growing self-dependence and class-consciousness of women, their employment in modern industry and the popularization of social and biological science. These and many other elements are worked up by discussion, producing an atmosphere in which the conventions of fifty years ago seem prudish and absurd. A novel, a play, or a social programme will succeed now which our fathers and mothers would have suppressed.

I doubt whether rules can be formulated which will help us much in interpreting the state of the social mind and predicting what success a given proposition will have. The attempts which have been made in this direction, such as those of Tarde in his Logique sociale, seem to me mechanical and unilluminating. If we accept the view that the higher intelligence is a complex imaginative synthesis, there is little reason for expecting help from such rules. What is necessary is that the interpreter and prophet shall have the knowledge and vision to reproduce in himself the essential influences of the time, and so, by a dramatic process, carry on the movement in his imagination and foresee the outcome. No formula of psychological selection will be of much use. Life is not subject to such formulas.

If an idea is quite incapable of working in the actual situation, if there is no soil in which it can grow, people will take no interest in it, it will not “take hold” anywhere, but come and go as a mere flitting impression, not even achieving definite statement. It is certain that ideas not infrequently occur to men which will later be esteemed as great truths, but are rejected by those to whom they occur because they do not kindle in the actual trend of thought. This was the case with the Darwinian idea of development through the survival of the fittest; several persons who are known, and probably others who are not known, having seen it vaguely long before Darwin, and it came to power only when the situation was ripe.

It is particularly true of social and moral ideals, since these are never novel or obscure in themselves, but are old thoughts renewed and illuminated from time to time by successive waves of faith. The Christian conception of a society of brothers with God as a loving father, is probably older than civilization, and can never have been far from men’s desires. The case is much the same with the idea of democracy, with Rousseau’s idea of the nobility of human nature and the depravity of institutions, and with Kant’s moral imperative.

Even if an idea impresses an individual here and there it can hardly hold its ground without some kind of group support. Thus Hamerton says of the development of ideas in art: “The taste and knowledge of their contemporaries usually erect impassable barriers around artists. If there is no feeling or desire for a certain order of truth on the part of the public, the artist will have no stimulus to study that order of truth; nay, if he does study and render it, he will incur insult and abuse, and be thereby driven back into the line of subject and treatment which his contemporaries understand.”^[77]

However, an idea that gets possession of even one individual so that he will formulate and defend it cannot be said to have failed. It takes its part in the larger discussion, and, however contumeliously rejected, it will leave some impress upon the ideas that are accepted. And the stone that the builders reject may prove to be the cornerstone of to-morrow’s edifice.

Educated men are often alarmed by the spread of superficial doctrines which have a timely appeal to passion or interest, and seem likely to sweep the people off their feet and into disaster. It is normal in the history of the United States, or of any country where there is some freedom of speech, that there should be a numerous party of radicals advocating some social or economic heresy like populism, free silver, revolutionary socialism, anarchism, or the like. And indeed we sometimes narrowly escape being swamped by these waves of unreason.

But if the doctrine is really superficial it is likely to prove transient. As time goes on people have opportunity to experiment with it, usually on a small scale, and if they are fairly intelligent and their social condition not desperately bad this gives rise to a sounder judgment. In the meantime the particular situation which gave impetus to the doctrine is likely to have changed, as the free-silver agitation, for example, was undermined by the increased production of gold and the advent of higher prices.

Another way by which unwise propositions tend to be eliminated is what may be called cancellation. The multitude of frothy schemes that secure a following might well discourage us did we not reflect that they are as antagonistic to one another as they are to good sense, so that the net resultant may be zero. If we have, on the one hand, extreme anarchists who would break down all discipline, we have, on the other, collectivists who would take away all freedom. It is in the very nature of error to lack adaptability to the rest of life, so that it cannot well form large wholes. The saying that no combination of wise men could resist a combination of all the fools does not show much insight at the best, and may be answered by saying that those who combine effectively cannot be fools, since they are meeting one of the most exacting tests of intelligence.

We cannot assert, however, that harmful ideas are necessarily eliminated and that only the beneficial survive. All that we can say with confidence in this direction is that social organisms are subject to a struggle, and in order to survive have to exhibit a certain measure of efficiency, or power to meet the struggle. If they have a long life it shows that ideas and practices injurious with reference to the struggle have been kept within limits. If we go beyond this and assert an onward and upward tendency in life we must, I think, rely finally upon faith rather than demonstration to support our belief.

Much that has shown a vigorous power of survival all through history we believe to be harmful, as, for example, drink, prostitution, and many forms of superstition. Scarcely anything has swept over the world more triumphantly than the tobacco habit, which, to say the least, is under suspicion. Professor Keller reminds us that there are such things as harmful mores, and he instances a number of customs relating to marriage that are clearly of this kind.^[78] The scruples of the people of India about killing poisonous snakes result in an immense increase of these animals, and of human deaths. Many of the ancient beliefs surviving in backward parts of our own country regarding the sowing of crops only when the “sign of the moon” is favorable, and the like, are of a similar nature.

The fact that extremes of riches and poverty, subjection of women and domination of one class over another have existed throughout history is no proof that such conditions are innocuous, but merely that they have not been so destructive as to prevent survival. And, in general, we may say of the social system that comes down to us from the past that, while as a whole and in its longer tested parts it has proved capable of life, we have no reason to think that this life is of the highest kind practicable.

In a time of rapid change the struggle of ideas becomes both more intense and more confused. The social whole is in somewhat the position of a man who has been thrown out of his old occupation and is trying to establish himself in a new one: many questions press upon him at once, while the rules and habits he has been used to go by do not suit the changed conditions. In a more settled time there are traditional beliefs which serve as accepted standards of judgment—as the Scriptures or the writings of the Fathers have served in the history of the church. But in our own period—though we are no doubt too much in it to judge truly of its character—it seems that hardly any authority remains, that we have to create the law as well as make decisions under it.

The effort of intelligence to find a rational course in such a time results in a somewhat anarchic conflict of diverse interpretations. Extreme views of many sorts are urged, and there is no accredited arbiter to decide among them.

In the midst of this the ordinary individual, who has no taste for complex thought but longs only for peace with honor, is often in a sad condition. He is like the little neutral country caught up into the struggle of contending Powers and overrun by all of them, unable to stand alone or to find a sure support.

But the more deeply the ground is rent the more fundamental are the truths revealed. A conflict that destroys accepted principles almost certainly brings to light others that are more general and permanent, because after all life is rational, it seems, and the social mind, when pushed to it, has usually been able to discover as much of this rationality as it really needed. As regards religious belief we can already see that ideas of a scope and depth that few could have attained fifty years ago are now becoming domesticated in every-day thought. The conflict in this field has resulted in the perception that none of the contending creeds and forms is essential, but that the permanently human and divine reality, not confined in any formulation, creates new expression for itself along with the general growth of life.

Indeed it would seem that the struggles of the age have given us at least one principle which change cannot easily overthrow; the principle, namely, that life itself is a process rather than a state; so that we no longer expect anything final, but look to discover in the movement itself sufficient matter for reason and faith.

PUBLIC OPINION AN ORGANIC PROCESS RATHER THAN A CONSENSUS—DECISION—THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MINORITIES

Public opinion, if we wish to see it as it is, should be regarded as an organic process, and not merely as a state of agreement about some question of the day. It is, in truth, a complex growth, always continuous with the past, never becoming simple, and only partly unified from time to time for the sake of definite action. Like other phases of intelligence, it is of the nature of a drama, many characters taking part in a variegated unity of action. The leaders of the day, not only in politics but in every field, the class groups—capitalists, socialists, organized labor, professional men, farmers and the like—the various types of radicals and reactionaries; all these are members of an intricate, progressing whole. And it is a whole for the same reason that a play is, because the characters, though divergent and often conflicting, interact upon one another and create a total movement which the mind must follow by a total process. For practical uses as well as for adequate thinking this conception is better than the idea of public opinion as agreement. It aims to see the real thing, the developing thought of men, in its genesis and tendencies, and with a view to its probable operation.

The view that we have no public opinion except when, and in so far as, people agree, is a remnant of that obsolete social philosophy which regarded individuals as normally isolated, and social life as due to their emerging partly from this isolation and coming together in certain specific ways. It is this habit of thought, apparently, that makes it difficult for most persons to understand that a group which has maturely thought over and discussed a matter arrives at a public opinion regarding it whether the members agree or not. That is, the mental process has developed about the matter in question and there has come to be a unity of action, as in a play, which insures that, however opinions may differ, they make parts of a whole, each having helped to form all the others. No one would deny unity of action to Macbeth because the characters are various and conflicting; if they were not, the unity would be too mechanical to be of interest; and so would it be with opinion if it attained any such uniformity as is sometimes supposed.

It is true that a process of opinion can hardly exist without a certain underlying like-mindedness, sufficient for mutual understanding and influence, among the members of the group; if they are separated into uncommunicating sections the unity of action is lost. Race difference may do this (largely, perhaps, by making men think they are more unlike than they are), religious division has done it, also traditional hostility, as where one nation has subjugated another, and even social caste. But communicated differences are the life of opinion, as cross-breeding is of a natural stock.

The main argument for basing the idea of public opinion upon agreement is that this is the only method of decision and consequently of action; which is what all is for; in other words, that it is only as agreement that opinion can function.

It is true that decision is a phase of the utmost importance, corresponding to choice in the individual, and that the whole process of attention, discussion, and democratic organization is, in a sense, a preparation for it. It is equally true, however, that it is only a partial and often a superficial act, involving compromise and adjusted to a particular contingency. A real understanding of the human mind, both in its individual and public aspects, requires that it be seen in the whole process, of which majorities and decisions are but transient phases. The choice of to-day is important; but the inchoate conditions which are breeding the choices to come are at least equally so. We shall be interested to find whether Democrats or Republicans win the next election; but how much more interesting it would be to know what obscure group of non-conformers is cherishing the idea that will prevail twenty years from now.

The organic view seems to be the only one that does justice to the significance of minorities. If you think of agreement as the essential thing they appear as mere remnants, refractory and irreconcilable factions of no great importance. But if you have an eye for organic development, it is obvious that minorities, even small ones, may be the most pregnant factors in the situation. All progress, all notable change of any kind, begins with a few, and it is, accordingly, among the small and beginning parties that we may always look for the tendencies that are likely to dominate the future. Originality, faith, and the resolution to make things better are always in a minority, while every majority is made up for the most part of inert and dependent elements.

It is a fact of the utmost significance when a few, or even a single individual, are so convinced of something that they are willing to stand up for it in the midst of a hostile majority; their very isolation insuring that they have more convincing grounds for their action than the ordinary undecided and conforming citizen. So Liebknecht, who alone in the German Reichstag opposed and denounced the war, was perhaps of more significance than all the more docile mass of the Socialist party. All great movements have in their early history heroes and often martyrs who were the seed of their future success.

There is nothing more democratic than intelligent and devoted non-conformity, because it means that the individual is giving his freedom and courage to the service of the whole. Subservience, to majorities, as to any other authority, tends to make vigorous democracy impossible.

WHAT IS RATIONAL CONTROL?—STANDARDS AS TESTS OF FUNCTION—MINIMUM STANDARDS—MECHANICAL TREND OF STANDARDIZATION—HIGHER FUNCTIONS NOT NUMERICALLY MEASURABLE—THE JUDGMENT OF EXPERT GROUPS—NEED OF STANDARD-SETTING GROUPS—UNIVERSITIES AS STANDARD-MAKERS—THE CRITIC

The ideal aim of intelligence seems to be the rational control of human life. Just what do we mean by this? Surely not that a conscious process must everywhere be substituted for an unconscious; common sense tells us that this is impracticable or inexpedient. Perhaps a fair statement would be that we mean by rational control a conduct of affairs such that their working, in a large way, commends itself to intelligence, even though not always guided by it.

A man’s every-day life runs, for the most part, on instinct and habit. His digestion and other physiological functions, his routine work and recreation, go on without much help from his thinking. Rational control consists mainly in a certain watchfulness over these processes, which awakes attention when anything goes wrong with them, and applies an intelligent remedy if it can. It is quite as likely to be manifested by judicious inactivity as by interference. So with the manager of a factory: the secret of effective control, in his case, is to allow every machine and every subordinate to do his own work, paying, for the most part, no attention to the details, and yet carrying in his mind an ideal of the working of the whole which enables him to see and correct anything that goes wrong. Likewise with the social organization at large. Its working consists, in great preponderance, of ideas, feelings, actions that have no conscious reference to the system as a whole, but are, from that point of view, merely mechanical; while rational control calls for an intelligence and idealism that understands how the whole ought to work, and exerts the necessary authority at the right time and place.

There is a certain presumption in favor of letting the unconscious processes alone. They are the outcome of a tentative development, confused and blind for the most part, but resulting in something that does, after a fashion, work; and this is no mean achievement. One of the best fruits of our study of history is to perceive how little we know, and how possible it is that what appears to us senseless and harmful does serve some useful purpose. A conservatism like that of Burke is always worth considering, whose later writings, as every one knows, are largely an endeavor to make us conscious of the limits of consciousness, in order that we may conserve the benefits that we owe to unconscious growth. The traditional organisms of society—language, folkways, common law and the like—exhibit on the whole an adaptability to conditions, a workableness, that could not be equalled by reflective consciousness alone. The latter may give us Volapük, but from the former we have the English of Shakespeare.

Nevertheless there is an evident need of a competent intelligence to watch and supplement the unconscious processes. George Meredith compares the irregular and uncertain progress of the world to that of a drunkard staggering toward home,

No doubt it does get on, after a fashion, but the fashion is often one that is disgraceful to a rational being. While there is a great deal of truth in the idea of the involuntary beneficence of economic competition, it is certain that under the too great sway of this idea natural resources are wasted, children stunted and deprived of opportunity, women exploited, and the unrighteous allowed to thrive.

If we consider how rational control may be achieved we are led at once into the question of standards of service. If we could devise and apply, in connection with every function, some sound test of performance, so that all concerned might know just what good service is, and how the service of one agent compares with that of another, the question of control would become simple.

This would not only act directly to promote efficiency of every sort through selecting the best men and methods, and holding them to a high grade of work, but would have an immeasurably beneficent effect in diffusing through the community order, contentment, clearness of purpose, and good-will, instead of the confusion, unrest, and hostility that now so largely prevail. Standards of any kind, if generally accepted, have the same kind of effect that the use of money has in economic exchanges: they make relations definite and thus facilitate co-operation and allay disputes. Ill-feeling, whether toward other persons or toward life in general, is based chiefly, perhaps, on resentments and perplexities arising from the lack of settled valuations. If we all knew what our place in life was and what our just claims were, as compared with those of others, the confusion that now prevails would subside.

We may distinguish, as regards human conduct, two sorts of standards: the higher or emulative, instigating us to attain or approach an ideal, and minimum standards or limits of toleration, conformity to which is more or less compulsory. The former appeal to the more capable and ambitious, the latter are imposed on the backward. One defines the type at the bottom, the other at the top.

In almost every kind of activity it is harmful to tolerate those who fall below a certain level of achievement: they not only set a bad example and lower the grade of service, but impair co-operation and esprit de corps. Even in competitive games, such as foot-racing, jumping, golf, and the like, it is usual to classify the players so that those in each group shall be sufficiently homogeneous to incite one another to do their best; and every one knows how detrimental is the influence of a player of a lower class. In the breeding of animals we have the immemorial practice of eliminating individuals who lack certain “points,” and the social science of eugenics aims, in a similar manner, to set a standard of propagation for the human race. Our whole body of penal law is a system of minimum requirements as to conduct, and the conventions or mores enforced by public sentiment have much the same character.

The idea is ancient and familiar, its present interest arising largely from a tendency to apply it more and more stringently in the control of economic competition. It appears here in a great variety of forms, but the general aim is to classify more definitely the kinds of economic struggle, to determine who are and who are not legitimate participants in each, and to see to it that all are carried on under proper rules for the protection of the weak and the welfare of the public.

All competent students feel that there is urgent need of a rational programme for the protection from crushing and degradation of those who, for whatever reason, are not in a position to protect themselves. If their weakness is intrinsic they need to be removed from the general struggle and put in a class by themselves; if it is accidental they require intelligent succor while they are recovering their strength.

The weak side of the standardization idea, as applied to society, is its trend toward the numerical and mechanical. An external, visible test, almost always superficial in this sphere, is easy to apply, and for that reason recommends itself to all who seek precise results without an exercise of the higher faculties of the mind. This, added to the prestige which numerical methods have gained by their value to physical science, has given rise to a formalism which intrudes them where they do not belong, and inspires a confidence in results often in inverse ratio to their value.

To the statistical type of mind precision is apt to seem in itself a guaranty of truth, and it is common to see elaborate calculations based on assumptions which will not bear scrutiny. The authors of such structures instinctively avoid any kind of thinking except mathematical. This was partly the case with Francis Galton, a man of real eminence, who made a statistical study of men of genius, in which the numerical part is logically dependent upon the postulate that practically all men of genius become famous.^[81] This view he does not examine adequately; the bent of his mind unfitted him to do so. He had to have a standard test of genius in order to open the way for statistical treatment; and he easily convinced himself that fame was such a test. His postulate, however, is pretty clearly false, and his calculations, consequently, of doubtful value.

Many accept numerical system and precision as “science” without further inquiry. I have seen a university faculty adopt without question a resolution recommending as scientific the distribution of examination marks according to the statistical curve of chance variations from a mean, when probably few if any of those present had asked themselves whether it was likely, in common sense, that the performances of the students followed any such law.

Numerical tests may, no doubt, be used to compare the results of processes which are in themselves nonmechanical and perhaps inscrutable. Thus of two salesmen spending the same time on similar routes selling the same goods at the same prices, one will sell twice as many as the other; it is often impossible to say why. “Personality” does it; that is, a complex of influences beyond the sphere of precise analysis. But you can measure the results of its operation and be fairly sure they will be repeated. It is the same with authors. When a new writer submits the manuscript of a novel the publisher can make only a very uncertain guess as to how many copies of it will sell; but when several novels have been published and shown their power to interest the public a reasonably safe prediction is possible. The statistical method does not require that the process we are testing be understood, but only that it be uniform. In that case its future working may be predicted from its past. There is a large and legitimate field for ingenuity in thus standardizing human function.

Formalism is apt to come in, however, by our taking a mechanical view of the function itself, of the end to be sought, in order to make it more easily measurable. This objection may be made, for example, to rating and rewarding salesmen according to the amount of their sales. It seems that this is not, in practice, a good plan, because their behavior counts in many ways not covered by such a calculation. A merchant says: “If you have five hundred sales-people working on a straight commission basis, you have five hundred individuals who are, in principle, each one in business for himself.... This means that there is no group spirit, no sense of unity in the organization, no co-operative spirit present. It works out very badly.” He suggests a modified test, also numerical, which is inadequate in theory, however it may work. The complete function of personality is never measurable. We have the same fallacy in the attempts to measure the value of a professor by the number of students electing his courses, or the number of hours he spends in his classroom.

It seems to be a general truth that the higher a social or mental function the less capable it is of numerical measurement; the reason being that the higher functions are acts of creative organization that can be appreciated only by a judgment of the same order. The work of a lawyer, a teacher, a clergyman, a man of science, even of an artistic craftsman, can be measured only by expert opinion. Our tests of the mental capacity of children should be mechanical only in so far as they relate to mechanical processes, like verbal memory or calculation. When it comes to higher capacities, like the understanding of complex ideas or sentiments, such as honor, the test, if it is to be of any value, must be applied, not mechanically, but by some one of imagination to understand what the child means by his answers.

I have little confidence in the more ambitious projects of some psychologists in the way of measuring a priori the capacity of the mind for the various vocations. I do not doubt that many useful hints can be gained by laboratory methods; but if a function is essentially social the test should also be social: science should keep as close to nature as possible. In civil service examinations such qualifications as speed in typewriting may be ascertained by a mechanical test, but as regards any sort of social ability, such as fitness for collecting labor statistics, or conducting correspondence, the main reliance is necessarily placed on success in actual work of a similar character.

In short, any merely mechanical test of the higher human faculties and achievements is, and must remain, an illusion. The only real criterion is the sympathetic and, as it were, participating judgment of a mind qualified by capacity and training to understand these faculties and share in their operation. Goethe maintained that the only competent critic of literary work is the man who can do similar work himself, and the principle is of wide application.

Is there, then, any way of testing the higher functions, involving leadership and creative organization, so as to maintain a high level of performance? There is no way that is precise or final, especially where originality is in question—since it is the nature of originality to set aside accepted tests—but higher functions of a somewhat settled character may be kept up to the mark through the judgments of an expert group. The various branches of natural science—say, astronomy, geology, or physiology—offer good examples, in that each possesses a group of men with high and definite ideals as to what is standard achievement in their specialty, and with a disposition to apply these in exalting the worthy and casting the unworthy out. It is much the same in all the so-called learned professions. The principle applies also, though with a somewhat looser discipline, in literature, sculpture, painting, architecture, and music; that is, achievement in each of these is appraised, more or less decisively, by a competent special group.

Such groups may act quite definitely. They may form associations and appoint judges—let us say to accept or reject paintings for an exposition, or to select among competing plans for a public building. The judges, if they are competent, do not decide wholly according to old models or traditions. They are men trained by active participation in the artistic endeavors of the time, and they aim, by an effort of creative appreciation, to understand what new achievement an artist has sought, and the measure of his success.

In spheres like patriotism, philanthropy, and religion, the standards are embodied in the lives and works of men whom the appreciative imaginations of a kindred group recognize as bearers of the ideal. For the Christian tradition the “glorious company of the apostles, the noble army of martyrs,” and their successors incarnate the ideals of the group in cherished examples.

In this regard society greatly needs a more various and closely knit group organization. The modern enlargement of relations has in part broken down the old groups, based chiefly on locality, family, and class, and brought in a somewhat formless and unchannelled state of things for which a remedy must apparently be sought in the development of groups of a new kind. Only close and lasting co-operation can discipline the individual and provide standards for every kind of function.

It is peculiarly requisite to have vigorous and distinctive groups devoted to achievement for which there is no commercial reward. We need men who will passionately set themselves to do fine and ever finer work, hungry for perfection, careless of popular recognition, inspired by congenial example and appreciation, and creating higher standards for those who follow.

The action of commercialism in repressing higher achievement is quite simple: it merely sets up such a din that it is hard to hear anything else. It is ever assailing us from newspapers and from the voices, eyes, and actions of our associates. If we have no momentum of our own it carries us along. It is scarcely possible for one to make separate headway against it: we must have groups and environments, organized to other ends, in which we may take refuge.

It is a frequent remark that it is the function of the universities to set the standards of modern democracy. I suppose the idea of this is that since we have abandoned the standard-setting leadership of a hereditary class we must look for a substitute to groups trained and inspired by the educational institutions. This implies a noble conception of such institutions, and the more one thinks of it the more reasonable it appears. It would mean that the universities should select and train competent men in all the more intellectual functions, including literature and the fine arts, inspiring them with ideals which, as members of special groups, they would uphold and effectuate for the good of society. Beyond this, it should mean for all students a moral culture and spirit of devotion to their country and to humanity fit to set the standards of the nation in these high regards. I do not think that such supreme leadership or standard-setting can come from any one source, but the universities, as the appointed organs of higher culture, may aspire to take a large part in it. To their actual achievement only moderate praise can be given.

When I am raking and burning leaves, as I have to in the fall and spring, I often light one little pile, and, when it is well afire, I pick from it a burning leaf or two on my rake and carry them to the next pile, which thus catches their flame. It seems to me that this is what a university should do for the higher life of our people. It should be on fire, and each student who goes out should be a burning leaf to start the flame in the community where he goes.

The working out of higher control turns much upon the critic, whose function is no less than to incarnate intelligence, to embrace in his mind the whole organism and process, and to evaluate the operation of every part. In literature and art the competent critic—Goethe, let us say, or Sainte-Beuve—aims to appreciate each man’s work as a function of the universal spirit and declare its part in the whole. The same principle applies to more special groups. In the army the critic is the consummate officer who, in times of peace, observes carefully the tests and evolutions and brings to bear upon every detail an expert judgment of its significance with reference to that success in war which is his supreme ideal. In industry, considered as production, he is the efficiency expert. Considering it from the standpoint of human welfare he is a social expert with or without official standing.

All the settled and interesting lines of human achievement naturally produce critics, because contemplative men, familiar with the tradition, find enjoyment in surveying the field as a whole, and appraising the various contributions. The matter is bound up with organization, and where that is lacking criticism is usually weak. For this reason, largely, American culture is sadly deficient in it.

We urgently need a criticism of our social system that shall be competent to a somewhat authoritative estimate of the human value of the various activities. In order to this it must be well instructed in social science and history, familiar also with practical conditions, courageous, judicious, and highly gifted by nature with insight and faith. We have not attained this as yet; our judgments, like the conditions themselves, are in much confusion. It is fairly apparent, however, that social criticism is growing with the growth of research and endeavor. Although social workers are ardent people, often with a good deal of bias, yet their serious struggle with real conditions, preceded, commonly, by academic training, has already enabled them to illumine many obscure matters and put public sentiment in right tracks. And the more retired students who deal with social psychology, philosophy, and statistics are no doubt doing their part also. There is a decline in that particularistic spirit that spent itself in the advocacy of conflicting panaceas, and a growth in the larger spirit which judges all schemes with reference to a common organic ideal.

DRAMATIC CHARACTER OF THE SCIENCES OF LIFE—SPECIAL CHARACTER OF SOCIOLOGY—NUMERICAL EXACTNESS NOT ITS IDEAL—QUALIFICATIONS OF A SOCIOLOGIST—PRACTICAL VALUE OF SOCIOLOGY

We have seen that social intelligence is essentially an imaginative grasp of the process going on about us, enabling us to carry this forward into the future and anticipate how it will work. It is a dramatic vision by which we see how the agents now operating must interact upon one another and issue in a new situation. How shall we apply this idea to social science? Shall we say that that too is dramatic?

There would be nothing absurd in such a view. All science may be said to work by a dramatic method when it takes the results of minute observation and tries to build them into fresh wholes of knowledge. This, we know, takes creative imagination; the intelligence must act in sympathy with nature and foresee its operation. The work on the evolution of life for which Darwin is most famous may justly be described as an attempt to dramatize what mankind had come to know about plants and animals. He took the painfully won details and showed how they contributed to a living process whose operation could be traced in the past, and possibly anticipated for the future. And, indeed, so homogeneous is life, the phases he found in this process—divergence, struggle, adaptation—are much the same as have always been recognized in the drama.

Darwin regarded the study of fossils as a means to the better understanding of life upon earth, as a way to see what is going on, and in like manner the precise observation of individuals and families in sociology is preparatory to a social synthesis whose aim also is to see what is going on.

The routine conception of science as merely precise study of details is never a sound one, and is particularly barren in the social field. If we are to arrive at principles or have any success at all in prediction we must keep the imagination constantly at work. And even in detailed studies we must dramatize more or less to make the facts intelligible. An investigator of juvenile delinquency who was not armed with insight as well as schedules would not report anything of much value.

There are marked differences, however, between biology and sociology, considered as studies of process, of which I will note especially two. One is that in biology essential change in types is chiefly slow and not easily perceptible. For the most part we have to do with a moving equilibrium of species and modes of life repeating itself generation after generation. It took a Darwin to show, by comparing remote periods, that nature was really evolving, dramatic, creative.

In social life, on the other hand, change is obvious and urgent; so that the main practical object of our science is to understand and control it. The dramatic element, which in biology is revealed only to a titanic imagination, becomes the most familiar and intimate thing in experience. Any real study of society must be first, last, and nearly all the time a study of process.

Again, the sciences that deal with social life are unique in that we who study them are a conscious part of the process. We can know it by sympathetic participation, in a manner impossible in the study of plant or animal life. Many indeed find this fact embarrassing, and are inclined to escape it by trying to use only “objective” methods, or to question whether it does not shut out sociology and introspective psychology from the number of true sciences.

I should say that it puts these studies in a class by themselves: whether you call them sciences or something else is of no great importance. It is their unique privilege to approach life from the point of view of conscious and familiar partaking of it. This involves unique methods which must be worked out independently. The sooner we cease circumscribing and testing ourselves by the canons of physical and physiological science the better. Whatever we do that is worth while will be done by discarding alien formulas and falling back upon our natural bent to observation and reflection. Going ahead resolutely with these we shall work out methods as we go. In fact sociology has already developed at least one original method of the highest promise, namely that of systematic social surveys.

The reason that students of the principles of sociology (as distinguished from those whose aim is immediately practical) are somewhat less preoccupied with the digging out of primary facts than with their interpretation, is simply that, for the present, the latter is the more difficult task. We have within easy reach facts which, if fully digested and correlated, would probably be ample to illuminate the whole subject. It is very much as in political economy, whose principles have been worked out mainly by the closer and closer study and interpretation of facts which, as details, every business man knows.

Knowledge requires both observation and interpretation, neither being more scientific than the other. And each branch of science must be worked out in its own way, which is mainly to be found in the actual search for truth rather than by a priori methodology. Sociology has as ample a field of verifiable fact as any subject, and it is not clear that the interpretations are more unsettled than they are elsewhere. The chief reason why it has developed late and still appears uninviting to many is the very abundance and apparent confusion of the material, which seems to take away the hope of simple, sure, and lasting results. One purpose in our study of principles is to restore this hope and give order to this abundance. And while there are certainly special difficulties, as in all sciences, our own is coming to afford, I think, as great intellectual attraction as can be found in other studies, along with a human and social character peculiar to itself. It will be strange if an increasing proportion of good minds do not give themselves to it.

While I ascribe the utmost importance to precision in preparing the data for social science, I do not think its true aim is to bring society within the sphere of arithmetic. Exact prediction and mechanical control for the social world I believe to be a false ideal inconsiderately borrowed from the provinces of physical science. There is no real reason to think that this sort of prediction or control will ever be possible.

Much has been made of the fact that human phenomena, when studied statistically on a large scale, often show a marked numerical uniformity from year to year; and some have even inferred that human spontaneity is an illusion, and that we are really controlled by mathematical laws as precise as those which guide the course of the planets. But I take it that such uniformities as are to be observed in births, marriages, suicides, and many other human phenomena do not indicate underlying principles analogous to the laws of gravitation or chemical reaction. They merely show that under a given social condition the number of persons who will choose to perform certain definite acts within the year may remain almost the same, or may be increased or diminished by certain definite changes, such as the advent of war or economic hardship. They no more prove that human conduct is subject to numerical law than does the fact that I eat three meals a day, or that I shall spend more money if my salary is raised, and less if it is diminished.

In other words statistical uniformities do not show that it is possible to predict numerically the working of intelligence in new situations, and of course that is the decisive test. Where exact prediction is possible the whole basis of it I take to be the fact that the general social situation remains the same, or is changed in ways which do not involve new problems of choice in the field studied. In short, the more the question is one of intelligence the less the numerical method can cope with it.

Uniformity in the suicide rate, so far as it exists, shows that the causes of suicide, whatever they may be, are operating in about the same degree from year to year, that the social situation is static, or rather in moving equilibrium. It reveals no law of suicide beyond the fact that it is connected in some definite way with the social situation in general. It does not help you to understand why Saul Jones killed himself, or to predict whether Jonathan Smith will or not. All you know is that if the general current of human trouble goes on about the same, the number of cases is not likely to vary much.

Serious attempts to understand suicide and to predict its prevalence under various conditions are based, if they are intelligent, upon psychological theories of an imaginative character. Thus Dürkheim, in his book upon the subject, develops the idea of “altruistic” suicide, and enables us to understand how a disgraced army officer, for example, might be driven to it by social pressure. To such studies statistics is only an adjunct.

In the case of marriage you may be able to predict with some accuracy the effect of the simpler sort of economic changes, such as larger or smaller crops, but, if so, it is because marriage is a familiar problem, settled in much the same way by one generation after the other, on the basis of lasting instincts or conventions. You cannot, in the same way, anticipate the outcome of the next presidential campaign, or of any other transaction in which the human mind is confronting a fresh situation.

The only instrument that can in any degree meet the test of prediction, where new problems of higher choice confront the mind, is the instructed imagination, which, by a kind of inspired intelligence, may anticipate within itself the drama of social process, and so foresee the issue. That this supreme act of the mind, never more than partly successful, even in the simplest questions, can ever become, on a large scale, sure, precise, and demonstrable before the event, there is no evidence or probability. So far as we can now see or infer, social prediction, in the higher provinces, must ever remain tentative, and I suspect that all the sciences which deal with the life process are subject to a similar limitation. Darwin’s suggestion regarding the “free will” of the dinosaur would seem to indicate that this was his opinion.^[82]

Intelligent social prediction is contradictory to determinism, because, instead of ignoring the creative will, it accepts it and endeavors by sympathy to enter into it and foresee its working. If I predict an artistic or humanitarian movement, it is partly because I feel as if I myself, with whatever freedom and creative power is in me, would choose to share in such a movement.

The possibility of social science rests upon the hypothesis that social life is in some sense rational and sequent. It has been assumed that this can be true only if it is mechanically calculable. But there may easily be another sort of rationality and sequence, not mechanical, consistent with a kind of freedom, which makes possible an organized development of social knowledge answering to the organic character of the social process. The life of men has a unity and order of its own, which may or may not prove to be the same in essence as that which rules the stars. It seems to include a creative element which must be grasped by the participating activity of the mind rather than by computations. How far it can be known and predicted is a matter for trial. The right method is the one that may be found to give the best results. Apparently it is not, except in subordinate degree, the numerical method.

A sociologist must have the patient love of truth and the need to reduce it to principles which all men of science require. Besides this, however, he needs the fullest sympathy and participation in the currents of life. He can no more stand aloof than can the novelist or the poet, and all his work is, in a certain sense, autobiographic. I mean that it is all based on perceptions which he has won by actual living. He should know his groups as Mr. Bryce came to know America, with a real intimacy due to long and considerate familiarity with individuals, families, cities, and manifold opinions and traditions. He cannot be a specialist in the same way that a chemist or a botanist can, because he cannot narrow his life without narrowing his grasp of his subject. To attempt to build up sociology as a technical tradition remote from the great currents of literature and philosophy, would, in my opinion, be a fatal error. It cannot avoid being difficult, but it should be as little abstruse as possible. If it is not human it is nothing.

I have often thought that, in endowment, Goethe was almost the ideal sociologist, and that one who added to more common traits his comprehension, his disinterestedness and his sense for organic unity and movement might accomplish almost anything.

The method of social improvement is likely to remain experimental, but sociology is one of the means by which the experimentation becomes more intelligent. I think, for example, that any one who studies the theory of social classes—the various kinds, the conditions of their formation and continuance, their effect in moulding the minds of those who belong to them, and the like—using what has been written upon the subject to stimulate his own observation and reflection, will find that the contemporary situation is illumined for him and his grasp of the trend of events enhanced.

By observation and thought we work out generalizations which help us to understand where we are and what is going on. These are “principles of sociology.” They are similar in nature to principles of economics, and aid our social insight just as these aid our insight into business or finance. They supply no ready-made solutions but give illumination and perspective. A good sociologist might have poor judgment in philanthropy or social legislation, just as a good political economist might have poor judgment in investing his money. Yet, other things equal, the mind trained in the theory of its subject will surpass in practical wisdom one that is not.

At bottom any science is simply a more penetrating perception of facts, gained largely by selecting those that are more universal and devoting intensive study to them—as biologists are now studying the great fact of hereditary transmission. In so far as we know these more general facts we are the better prepared to work understandingly in the actual complexities of life. Our study should enable us to discern underneath the apparent confusion of things the working of enduring principles of human nature and social process, simplifying the movement for us by revealing its main currents, something as a general can follow the course of a battle better by the aid of a map upon which the chief operations are indicated and the distracting details left out. This will not assure our control of life, but should enable us to devise measures having a good chance of success. And in so far as they fail we should be in a position to see what is wrong and do better next time.

I think, then, that the supreme aim of social science is to perceive the drama of life more adequately than can be done by ordinary observation. If it be objected that this is the task of an artist—a Shakespeare, a Goethe, or a Balzac—rather than of a scientist, I may answer that an undertaking so vast requires the co-operation of various sorts of synthetic minds; artists, scientists, philosophers, and men of action. Or I may say that the constructive part of science is, in truth, a form of art.

Indeed one of the best things to be expected from our study is the power of looking upon the movement of human life in a large, composed spirit, of seeing it in something of ideal unity and beauty.

PROGRESS IS NOT IDENTICAL WITH GROWTH OF INTELLIGENT CONTROL—NOR IS IT DEMONSTRABLE—IT IS ESSENTIALLY TENTATIVE

I cannot accept the view that progress is nothing more or other than the growth of intelligent control. No doubt this is a large part of it; an enlightened and organized public will is, perhaps, our most urgent need; but, after all, life is more than intelligence, and a conception that exalts this alone is sure to prove inadequate. Progress must be at least as many-faceted as the life we already know. Moreover, it is one of those ideas, like truth, beauty and right, which have an outlook upon the infinite, and cannot, in the nature of the case, be circumscribed by a definition.

The truth is that it is often one of the requisites of progress that we trust to the vague, the instinctive, the emotional, rather than to what is ascertained and intellectual. The spirit takes on form and clarity only under the stress of experience: its newer outreachings are bound to be somewhat obscure and inarticulate. The young man who does not trust his vague intuitions as against the formulated wisdom of his elders will do nothing original.

The opinion sometimes expressed that social science should set forth a definite, tangible criterion of progress is also, I think, based on a false conception of the matter, derived, perhaps, from mechanical theories of evolution. Until man himself is a mechanism the lines of his higher destiny can never be precisely foreseen. It is our part to form ideals and try to realize them, and these ideals give us a working test of progress, but there can be nothing certain or final about them.

The method of our advance is, perhaps, best indicated by that which great individuals have used in the guidance of their own lives. Goethe, for example, trusted to the spontaneous motions of his spirit, studying these, however, and preparing for and guiding their expression. Each of his works represented one of these motions, and he kept it by him for years to work upon when the impulse should return. So the collective intelligence must wait upon the motions of humanity, striving to anticipate and further their higher working, but not presuming to impose a formal programme upon them.

The question whether, after all, the world really does progress is not one that can be settled by an intellectual demonstration of any kind. It is possible to prove that mankind has gained and is gaining in material power, in knowledge, and in the extent and diversity of social organization; that history shows an enlarging perspective and that the thoughts of men are, in truth, “broadened with the process of the suns”: but it is always possible to deny that these changes are progress. We seem to mean by this term something additional, a judgment, in fact, that the changes, whatever they may be, are on the whole good. In other words progress, as commonly understood, is essentially a moral category, and the question whether it takes place or not is one of moral judgment. Nothing of this kind is susceptible of incontrovertible demonstration, because the moral judgment is not bound by definite intellectual processes, nearly the same in all minds, but takes in the most obscure and various impulses of human nature.

Suppose you compare the state of the first white settlers in America, narrow and hard, physically, mentally, and socially, with the comparatively easy and spacious life of their descendants at the present time; or contrast the life of a European peasant, dwelling in mediæval ignorance and bondage, with that of the same peasant and his family after they have emigrated to the United States and come to a full share in its intelligence and prosperity. It may seem clear to most people that these changes, which are like those the world in general has been undergoing, are for the better; but the matter is quite debatable. The simpler lot of the pioneer and the peasant can easily be made to appear desirable, and there are, and no doubt always will be, those who maintain that we are no better off than we were.

Development, I should say, can be proved. That is, history reveals, beyond question, a process of enlargement, diversification, and organization, personal and social, that seems vaguely analogous to the growth of plant and animal organisms; but whether we are to write our moral indorsement on the back of all this is another matter. Is it better to be man or the marine animal, “resembling the larvæ of existing Ascidians,”^[83] from which he is believed to have descended? In the end it comes down to this: is life itself a good thing? We see it waxing and shining all about us, and most of us are ready to pronounce that it is good; but the pessimist can always say: “To me it is an evil thing, and the more of it the worse.” And there is no way of convincing him of error.

In short, the reality of progress is a matter of faith, not of demonstration. We find ourselves in the midst of an onward movement of which our own spirits are a part, and most of us are glad to be in it, and to ascribe to it all the good we can conceive or divine. This seems the brave thing to do, the hopeful, animating thing, the only thing that makes life worth while, but it is an act rather of faith than of mere intelligence.

I hold, then, that progress, like human life in every aspect, is essentially tentative, that we work it out as we go along, and always must; that it is a process rather than an attainment. The best is forever indefinable; it is growth, renewal, onwardness, hope. The higher life seems to be an upward struggle toward a good which we can never secure, but of which we have glimpses in a hundred forms of love and joy. In childhood, music, poetry, in transient hours of vision, we know a fuller, richer life of which we are a part, but which we can grasp only in this dim and flitting way. All history is a reaching out for, a slow, partial realization of, such perceptions. The thing for us is to believe in the reality of this larger life, seen or unseen, to cling to all persons and activities that help to draw us into it, to trust that though our individual hold upon it relax with age and be lost, yet the great Whole, from which we are in some way inseparable, lives on in growing splendor. I may perish, but We are immortal.

I look with wonder and reverence upon the great spirits of the past and upon the expression of human nature in countless forms of art and aspiration. It seems to me that back of all this must be a greater Life, high and glorious beyond my imagination, which is trying to work itself out through us. But this is in the nature of religion, and I do not expect to impose it upon others by argument.

As regards the proximate future I see little to justify any form of facile optimism, but conceive that, though the world does move, it moves slowly, and seldom in just the direction we hope. There is something rank and groping about human life, like the growth of plants in the dark: if you peer intently into it you can make out weird shapes, the expression of forces as yet inchoate and obscure; but the growth is toward the light.

ART AS JOYOUS SELF-EXPRESSION—IT DISENGAGES THE IDEAL—ENLARGES SYMPATHY—THE KINSHIP OF ART AND DEMOCRACY—ART AND LEISURE—DEMOCRATIC ART—ART AND SPECIALIZATION—COMMUNITY IDEALS—THE MERGING OF SOCIAL IDEALS IN RELIGIOUS

The art ideal is one of joyous self-expression. It appeals to the imagination because it seeks to bring in a higher freedom by making our activity individual and creative. There is nothing more inspiring, I think, than the lives of brave artists; they seem the pioneers of a better civilization. I am delighted to know that Ruysdael, by love and devotion, put himself into his landscapes and expressed things which others delight to find there. Indeed, I care much less for the landscapes than for this fact of personal self-realization: it gives me a breath of hope and joy, and encourages me in the practice of an art of my own.

The pleasure of creative work and the sharing of this by those who appreciate the product is in fact an almost unlimited source of possible joy. Unlike the pleasure of possessing things we win from others, it increases the more we share it, taking us out of the selfish atmosphere of every-day competition. A work of art is every man’s friend and benefactor, and when we hear a good violinist, or see a good play, or read a good book, we are not punished for our pleasure by the sense of having had it at some one else’s expense. The artist seems the divine man; he is free and creative, like God, and gives without taking away.

It is everywhere the nature of art to show us order and beauty in life. It takes the confused and distracting reality and, by omitting the irrelevant and giving life and color to the significant, enables us to see the real as the ideal. In every-day reality we are like ants in the grass for the bigness of detail: in art we see the landscape. It enlarges, supples, generalizes the mind, giving us life in selected and simplified impressions. Thus almost any genuine art cheers and composes the spirit. One of Millet’s peasants, “The Sower,” for example, or one of Thomas Hardy’s people, differs from anything of the sort we might see more directly as a mournful song differs from the jangle of actual grief: it “reveals man in the repose of his unchanging characteristics,” and deepens our sense of life. So in these noisy and unrestful times people flock to the motion-picture shows, or buy cheap fiction, in an eager quest of the ideal. How idle it is to deprecate, justly or otherwise, the poor taste of the masses, as if art were a matter of mere refinement, and not of urgent need!

Beyond this general function of disengaging the ideal, art has, more particularly, that of defining and animating our ideals of human progress. While the severest solitary thought is necessary in understanding society and in framing plans for its improvement, we must look to the drama and the novel, also to poetry, music, painting, sculpture and architecture, to put flesh and blood upon these abstractions and give them a real hold on the minds of the people. I cannot imagine any broad and rich growth of democracy without a corresponding development of popular art, and one of many indications that our democracy is as yet immature and superficial is its failure to achieve such a development. Our vision of our country is loyal, no doubt, but not deep, mellow, many-colored. The flavor of our civilization is like that of the thin maple-sap just from the tree, not much condensed or deposited in saccharine crystals.

Again, nothing has more power than art to enlarge human sympathy and unite the individual to his fellows. We feel this strongly now and then, as when a multitude rises to sing a patriotic song, but it belongs to all art whose material is drawn from the general human life. And it is in the nature of the higher kinds of art to draw from this general life, where alone idealism has any secure resting-place. So all great art makes us feel our oneness with mankind, and the grandeur of the common lot: the tragedy of King Lear, say, or the Book of Job, or the mediæval churches, or the figures of Michelangelo, or the great symphonies. It is full of noble reminiscence, and of “touches of things human till they rise to touch the spheres.”

Beethoven said that “the purpose of music is to bring about a oneness of emotion, and thus suggest to our minds the coming time of a universal brotherhood,” and certainly nothing can do more than popular art to make such a time possible. As music can melt us into a oneness of emotion, so drama and fiction can arouse and enlarge our social imaginations until we feel the common nature in people who before seemed strange or hostile to us. In this way, for example, Americans learn to find interest and value in the many-colored life of immigrants from Europe.

For much the same reason any high kind of social organization, one that lives in the spirit of the people and is not a mere mechanism, must exist largely through the medium of art, which chiefly has power to animate collective ideals. Those nations whose national aspirations are incarnated and glorified by poetry and painting may justly claim, in this respect, a higher civilization than those whose achievements are merely political, scientific, and industrial. If democracy is to do for the world all it hopes to do, it must develop greatly on this side; especially since a system that is to be worked by the masses is peculiarly dependent upon the diffusion of its ideals.

There is the closest possible relation in principle between the idea of art and that of democracy. The former, like the latter, exalts the inner self-reliance of the individual, saying “look in thy heart and write,” or paint, or sing, or whatever the mode of expression may be. The artist, in the act of creation, is always free, he is attending to, bringing to clearness and realizing that which is revealed to him alone, unfolding his highest individuality in the service of the whole, precisely as each citizen is called to do in a real democracy. And in fact there is nothing more democratic than a community of artists, just because of their preoccupation with what is intrinsic and individual.

Moreover the art spirit, accustomed to cherish individuality, tends to make us impatient of social conditions that are hostile to it. It hates repression and demands democracy as the basis of tolerable living. If we find that our fellow citizens lack self-expression our own life participates in their degradation. It is hardly imaginable that a real artist should be a formalist or a snob. The fact that we are so largely content with products that have no art or individuality in them really indicates a lack of higher freedom in ourselves, a low sense of personality and a domination by lifeless conventions.

If artists and lovers of art are often conservative as regards projects of social improvement, this may perhaps be ascribed to the need of sensitive natures for tranquillity, or to their sense of the value of conventions as a foundation for perfected works.

It is true that art culture requires leisure, but not more than we all ought to have, or than the majority, even now, do have. And idleness is hostile to it, because spiritually unhealthy. A man who is in the habit of doing an honest day’s work, manual or intellectual, will be in a better state to appreciate music or painting, other things equal, than one who is not. His whole being is more normal, more ethical, better prepared for a higher life. And so private wealth is often more a hindrance than a help.

If there be truth in the idea that only a minority can share the life of art, which is questionable, at any rate this minority, in a democratic society, will be one not of wealth or exceptional leisure, or even of education, but of intrinsic sensibility.

There are those who think that something wholly new is to be looked for in an art of democracy, and I suppose that in fact a larger human spirit will be found in the ideals it expresses or implies, just as every social product must reflect the spirit of the age. I do not see, however, that the general conceptions and methods of art, as the great tradition brings them to us, require any change.

Certainly art will never be commonplace or uniform, but always select, distinctive, and as various as life—even as democracy itself is a larger expression of human nature, and not the vulgarizing thing that its opponents have tried to make it out.

Nor will art ever be cheap, in a spiritual sense, and if it is so in a material sense it will be because it is supported and diffused by the community. Devotion to an ideal, material sacrifice, and the higher self-reliance, will always belong to the career of a real artist, as they always have. And as to the appreciator, he must earn his joy by attention, self-culture, and virtue. The only way that masses, under a democratic or any other order, can rise into a higher life, is by becoming worthy of it. A best seller or a motion-picture show appealing to the superficial and undisciplined sentiment of a million people is not the art we look for, though it may be better than none at all. I take it that we should try for a real culture and self-expression without concerning ourselves primarily with numbers, beyond providing for the diffusion of opportunity. Walt Whitman’s verse, so far as it is a noble expression of freedom and brotherhood, is good democratic art, though it has never been popular; but there is nothing especially democratic about the crudity which impairs it; and our New England poets are in no respect more truly American and democratic than in a moral refinement scarcely matched in any other school. If we are to have a form of art that is good in itself and also popular, this will come about, I suppose, by the mutual influence of a line of artists and an appreciating public, each educating and stimulating the other, until the movement penetrates the mass of the people, as has been the case with certain forms of art in Renaissance Italy, or in contemporary France.

We must not forget that democracy is itself one of the arts of a free people. I mean that the common man may find expression in a varied, intelligent, and joyous participation in the community life, outside of working-hours; in the conduct of towns, churches, schools, and other popular institutions, and in communal sports and recreations. There is a great deal of this now, and the possibilities are infinite.

And along with this we need a real art of democratic intercourse, disciplined and considerate, which shall give all of us the joy of self-expression and of feeling that others are expressing themselves in like freedom.

There are many who doubt whether self-expression, and therefore an art spirit, is possible along with the specialization of modern work. But it is not clear that specialization as such can destroy this spirit, even in the task itself, provided one is conscious of working for a worthy whole. The mediæval cathedrals were built by groups of masons, each of whom, no doubt, had his own special and for the most part humble task. If all shared the productive joy, as it is thought they did, it must have been because the work as a whole appealed nobly to the imagination, because there was fellowship and esprit de corps among the members of the group, and because each man felt free to use his intelligence and taste within his own sphere. If your work is suited to you, and you delight in the whole to which it contributes, the chief conditions of an art spirit are present.

It is not so certain as is often alleged that modern factory work, in its actual detail, is and must remain mere drudgery. In general, it is good management to give a man the most intelligent work he is fit for, and, in general, this kind of work will evoke most interest and self-expression. Much of what appears to be drudgery to an onlooker is not really so—there is commonly more room for skill and individuality in manual work than is apparent from the outside—and what is really so should tend to be eliminated by better training and placing, more considerate management, a better spirit of co-operation, and other probable improvements.

No doubt the free play of individuality, for most of us, must be sought outside of working-hours, but there should be something of self-expression and the spirit of art in all work.

Perhaps the greatest weakness of our idealism is that it does not imagine living social wholes. So strong is the individualist tradition in America and England that we hardly permit ourselves to aspire toward an ideal society directly, but think that we must approach it by some distributive formula, like “the greatest good of the greatest number.” Such formulas are unsatisfying to human nature, however justly they may give one aspect of the truth. The ideal society must be an organic whole, capable of being conceived directly, and requiring to be so conceived if it is to lay hold upon our imaginations. Do we not all feel the dispersive, numerical, uninspiring character of “the greatest good of the greatest number” as a call to faith and action? It is like covering a canvas with ten thousand human figures an inch high and crying: “Behold the ideal man!” No number, however vast, and no aggregation of merely individual good can satisfy the need of the imagination for a unitary conception. It is well to dwell at times on personal opportunity, comfort, self-expression, and the like, but at other times, and especially times of spiritual exaltation, we must have the vision of a larger good.

And our conception of life as a race in which every one must have a fair start, is useful but inadequate. It overstresses competition and fails to set before us worthy objects of endeavor. We need a conception more affirmative and inspiring, which shall above all give us something worth while to live for, something that appeals to imagination, hope, and love.

I think those nations were not wholly wrong who, rejecting the extreme doctrines of utilitarian individualism, have maintained the idea and feeling of a transcendent collective reality. Hegel’s view that “the state is the march of God in the world” appears mystical to us, but is in reality no more so than our exaltation of the individual. It is true that in Germany the dominant classes seized upon this doctrine of an ideal whole and made it an instrument for exploiting the masses of the people. But we constantly see that great truths are used for selfish ends, and we have a close parallel in the exploitation of the idea of individual freedom by English and American commercialism to maintain its own ascendancy.

The idealization of the state, the impressing of a unitary life upon the hearts of the people by tradition, poetry, music, architecture, national celebrations and memorials, and by a religion and philosophy teaching the individual that he is a member of a glorious whole to which he owes devotion, is in line with the needs of human nature, however it may be degraded in use by reactionary aims. Our country is backward, inferior to countries far less fortunate, in the richness, beauty, and moral authority of its public life. Our freedom is too commonly cold, harsh, and spiritually poor, and hence not really free. Let us hope that no theories may deter us from building up a national ideal of which love, beauty, and religion can be a part. We need a collective life which, without repressing individuality, personal or local, shall afford central emblems that all may look up to and a discipline in which all may share.

A deeper community spirit is needed throughout our society. Our towns, cities, and country neighborhoods should have more unity, individuality, and pride, with the local traditions, art, fellowship, and public institutions that express these. We want popular choruses, pageants, social centres, local arts and crafts, an indigenous painting, architecture, and sculpture, a vivid communal life leading up from the neighborhood to the nation.^[84]

Our idea of our country has plenty of vigor but lacks definite forms into which to flow. It does not sufficiently connect with real life, and, in ordinary times, is too commonly ineffective in raising us out of selfishness and confusion. Our picture of the republic is mostly a child’s sketch, without beauty of form or depth and harmony of color.

The direct and moving vision of the nation is sometimes to be had in our literature, though by no means in such various and familiar forms as we need. You will find it, for example, in Lowell’s ode, read in 1865 to commemorate Harvard students lost in the Civil War. I will not quote from it at length because its spirit is too impassioned to be congruous here, but read the ode as a whole, or the last two strophes, or even the concluding lines, beginning—

and you will see what I mean.

Ideals of human wholes like the community, the nation, the Commonwealth of Man, merge indistinguishably into the conception of a greater life, the object of faith and hope, continuous in some way with ours, but immeasurably transcending it. The human mind must ever conceive some kind of a life of God or “kingdom of heaven” answering to its need of a satisfying universe. And this conception is of the same essence and spirit as that of social wholes, which partake of this continuity, make a like appeal to faith and hope, and a like demand for devotion and sacrifice. If we put aside formal doctrine it seems clear that the kind of religion the modern world appears to be embracing, one which feels what is upward and onward in human life as our part in the life of God, is a kind of higher patriotism, hardly separable from our nobler ideals of our country. And patriotism, as it becomes exalted in times of trial, takes on a religious spirit.

It seems likely that social and religious worship, if I may use that term for both, will draw together again and abandon that somewhat artificial separation which political exigencies have brought about. I do not mean that ancient institutions now associated with them will lose their separate identity, so that we shall have a state church or an ecclesiastical state; forms of organization persist; but it would not be surprising if a growing unity of spirit and principle should bring the two into practical co-operation.

In the public schools the children learn group forms of play, in which they are accustomed to strive for a whole, and to put its success above their private aims; and they come to feel also that their personality is inseparable from the life of the community of which the school is a part. The spirit of mutual aid and public service should pass easily from the playground to the city, the state, and the nation. Along with this we look for a rise of communal art, in the form of music, plays, pageants, and municipal decoration, which shall enlist the feelings and hallow the larger life with cherished associations. To this we may add whatever ritual of patriotism shall be found expressive of the national spirit, a spirit animated, we hope, by membership in an international federation. And it is only a continuation of this enlarging membership and service to go on, by the aid of symbols and worship, from these visible social wholes to the invisible wholes, also social, of religious faith, to the Great Life in which our life is merged.

On the other side we see the church and the institutions connected with it reaching out toward social ideals and functions, recognizing that the salvation of the individual, possible only through that of society, calls for co-operation and service, without which worship is partial and unreal.

Indeed this spirit, whether we call it religious or social, is by no means confined to the visible institutions of the state or the church. It belongs to the spirit of the time, and may be felt in the several branches of learning, in philanthropy, in socialism, in the labor movement, and in the world of industry and trade. The conditions of life favor it, and in spite of all setbacks we may expect it to have an irresistible growth.