Part I

Chapter IV in Theories of Social Progress; a Critical Study of the Attempts to Formulate the Conditions of Human Advance (1918)

by: Arthur James Todd

"No man can take a walk without bringing home an influence on his eternity." (Jean Paul)

"Nothing can injure a man who is a member of a community which does not injure the community." (Marcus Aurelius)

The mind of the new-born child is not a tabula rasa as the empiric psychologists were prone to believe. But, in truth, so little is written thereon, the ink so pale, the characters so fragmentary, that the tabula, for any purposes of life, is little better than some torn and faded manuscript unless the characters be brought out, the writing completed. What, in the case of the child's mind, is this bringer-out or completer of the writing? Speaking popularly it is experience; speaking scientifically it is social heredity. But what is social heredity? It is the process by which the stock of incomplete instincts and tendencies secured to the individual by natural selection is completed, strengthened, shaped, and matured. In other words, it is the process by which the individual who arrives into the world with only a very incomplete kit of rude life-tools is enabled to fill up his kit with sharp tools which he knows how to use, and to go on his way equipped in the struggle for life. Briefly, it is education conceived in its widest sense. It is a social process, the social process. This is what we mean when we say that the human mind is a social product.

But if this is true of the mind as a whole, it is, if possible, even truer of that phase of mind called the "self " or the person. For all the time I am creating or building a mind I am building a world, and in and by the same process I am evolving a self. I cannot mark myself off from my world; I am only thinkable in terms of it, and vice versa. I am not apart from it; I am my world. " We usually set ourselves over against our world, as if we were one thing and it another; but the truth is, the two are one; our world is wholly our feeling, wholly subjective, except in so far as we place hypothetical essences behind different groups of our feelings, thereby transforming them into things. "¹Walt Whitman said almost the last word on this point in his poem, "There was a child went forth."

The world with which we are identified, which is our "self," is, however, not a world of atoms and ions, vortexes of motion, cosmic dust and all the other apparatus of physics and chemistry. Our world is a world of persons, and only very incidentally a world of things. If man is endogenous, as Emerson insisted, he only knows it because he has compared notes and finds every other person growing in the same way. We are all world builders, true; but our worlds hold together only for the reason that, like the ancients, we build human beings into foundations and walls. Foes and friends alike are worked in. We differ from the ancient builders, however, in this particular, that while they tossed in only now and again a living body, we use nothing else for our worlds; stone, mortar and all are living, throbbing flesh. To quit the metaphor, experience, and preëminently experience of persons, furnishes the materials for our world and for our selves.²

"Der Mensch erkennt sich nur im Menschen, nur
Das Leben lehret jedem was er sei."M

(Goethe, Tasso, Act 2, Sc. 3)

Through the "us" we learn of the "me."

It is difficult to say at precisely what point self and world-building commences. But probably the unborn child has made a start in laying his foundations, of which his first faint stirrings may be taken as the index. Feelings of comfort and discomfort, sensations of movement, begin to be correlated with or distinguished from dim sensations of pressure, resistance, perhaps even taste and other forms of contact. This dim dawning of the self we have already summed up under the term somatic consciousness. Whoever prefers to use the term self-instinct is at perfect liberty to do so, though instinct is such a vague omnibus expression that it may mean everything or nothing.

The first glimmering of a world the child learns as part of his mother's body. The social process has begun. But immediately upon his separation from the mother's flesh his world grows; a huge, vague, whirling, chaotic world to be sure, but a world which soon begins to take on more definite form, substance, and meaning. Now the curtain rises upon the great drama which with Baldwin we may entitle the " Dialectic of Mental Development. " Like the Chinese plays, this drama is a real continuous performance, a cycle wherein one day's playing writes the next day's action. But the unique quality of this drama is that spectators unite with the child who plays the title role. You and I, everybody within range, are pressed into service. There are no supernumeraries. The young actor in his evolution-play casts us all and practices with or upon us. As he begins to practice or correlate his experience with persons through activity, to establish by imitation common center of reference, his sense of self emerges.

" The baby new to earth and sky,...
Has never thought that ' this is I ';
But as he grows he gathers much,
And learns the use of ' I ' and ' me, '
And finds ' I am not what I see,
And other than the things I touch';
So rounds he to a separate mind
From whence clear memory may begin,
And thro ' the frame that binds him in
His isolation grows defined."

(Tennyson, In Memoriam, XLIV)

Tennyson seems here to see the self emerging by a sense of difference. Professor Howison expresses the same thing philosophically. To him the spirit is intrinsically individual; it is itself, and not any other. " But such a getting to exact identity can only be by means of difference; and difference, again, implies contrast, and so reference to others. Thus in thinking itself as externally real, each spirit inherently thinks the reality of all other spirits."³ But are the poet and philosopher, after all, right in making sense of difference the method of self-realization? Were not the savages in their crude philosophy of identity nearer right? That is to say, are not comparison and a resultant sense of similarity equally valid if not more valid principles of self-building? The philosopher seems to recognize this, for elsewhere he says: " That a mind conscious of itself as a self, means at the least that it discriminates itself from others, but therefore that it also refers its own defining conception to others,—is in relation with them, as unquestionably as it is in the relation of different from them. It cannot even think itself, except in this relatedness to them; it cannot at all be, except as a member of a reciprocal society."⁴

The meaning of "I," "mine," "me," is learned in exactly the same way as any other concept or sentiment is grasped, that is, by observing the fact or feeling in others, by comparing it with our own, and by standardizing, as it were, the feeling or idea by coupling it with its conventional symbol, a word. Personality is acquired through the habit of correlating activity, self-expression.⁵

Conversely, this process of fixing a center of gravity goes on only as the outer world, and especially the world of persons, defines itself. " For we learn to know ourselves, first of all, in the mirror of the world; or, in other words, our knowledge of our own nature and of its possibilities grows and deepens with our understanding of what is without us, and most of all with our understanding of the general history of man."⁶ The ego and the alter are thus seen to be one in substance and process. The world of copy and the world of practice are two faces of the same shield. " The development of the child's personality, " says Baldwin, " could not go on at all without the constant modification of his sense of himself by suggestions from others. So he himself, at every stage, is really in part some one else, even in his own thought of himself. "⁷

This same fact is brought out obversely by Professor Cooley's experience with his child R. He was much slower in understanding the personal pronouns and in his thirty-fifth month had not yet straightened them out, sometimes calling his father "me." "I imagine that this was partly because he was placid and uncontentious in his earliest years, manifesting little social self-feeling, but chiefly occupied with impersonal experiment and reflection; and partly because he saw little of other children by antithesis to whom his self could be awakened."⁸ All of which goes to show that in our knowledge, as in our conduct, we are never conscious of others except as related to ourselves; and perhaps never of ourselves except as connected with other selves. Even in what we are pleased to term our inmost selves we never fail to include "the silent witness," "the all-seeing eye," "the still small voice," or other ideal persons. Conversation with imaginary persons is proof of the essentially social nature of the mind; indeed it seems literally true, as some one has observed, that the mind lives in perpetual conversation.

Normal life, then, is never solitary, but always à deux. The fact of such eternal companionship reduces knowledge to terms of conduct. Thus neither the process of knowledge nor its functioning in conduct can go on properly in vacuo, cannot, in other words, be impersonal. Imagine, if you can, Robinson Crusoe, not as Robinson the castaway European, but as an unnamed something spontaneously generated on a lonely island. Where are his adventures, where his knowledge, where Robinson, indeed? You have robbed him of all that makes him Robinson. Robinson could only have been Robinson because like Tennyson's Ulysses he was already part of all that he had met. " What are we in fact, what is our character, if not the condensation of the history that we have lived from our birth—nay, even before our birth, since we bring with us prenatal dispositions? "⁹

It is easy enough thus to account for one's physical self or one's accumulation of knowledge in social terms. But what of one's moral nature? Morals are born of social life, say the students of social origins. Morality is the result of a special moral faculty, moral instinct, conscience, said the elder theologians and moralists. They had to postulate some such injected moral nature because they ignored the social genesis and nature of the personal self, and failed to observe that moral conduct is an adjustment between self and society.¹⁰

In sketching the development of the child's personality it would not be difficult to trace out parallelisms in the sense of " self " of the child and of the savage. This does not mean, however, that the child recapitulates literally the Kulturgeschichte of the race. For while child mind resembles savage mind in many points it also varies materially from it. To cite only one difference, it develops much faster than primitive mind. The reason of course lies in the greater stimulus coming from the social milieu of the civilized child. The child resembles the savage in vague notions about his physical " self. " The earliest parts of the physical self to attract attention are hands and fingers. Yet we are told that little girls often scold their fingers, as if they were things apart. Feet also are frequently apostrophized, punished, beaten, for breaking things, throwing the child down, etc.¹¹ At the age of three to five years the bones are generally noticed; next the stomach, heart, lungs, breath. Yet notwithstanding this growing knowledge children often fail to mark off sharply their sensory apparatus. Thus sometimes they think they hear with eyes, feet, or hands. And President Hall mentions " the very common impression of young children that if the eyes are covered or closed they cannot be seen. Some think the entire body thus vanishes from the sight of others, some that the head also ceases to be visible, and a still higher form of this curious psychosis is that when they are closed the soul cannot be seen."¹² Such facts indicate a rough free-hand blocking-in of the ego. "In fine, the ego may be first roughly conceived as all that is within the skin, and the non-ego as all outside it...Within the surface, the child's somatic consciousness does not at first penetrate."¹³The reason here seems to be the psychologic principle laid down in the preceding chapter, namely, that the physical self is not felt and distinguished as some separate Ding-an-sich; it is only known by its activity, or we might even go so far as to say as an activity. It is perfectly obvious that the activities of exterior members, hands, feet, mouth, nose, eyes, etc., will attract attention and be built into the self concept long before the silent workings of the visceral organs attract notice. Here again the social reference. For these exterior members are more readily observed by the child in others and by imitation and comparison knit up into his own consciousness. " The child does not at first work out the I-and-you idea in an abstract form. The first personal pronoun is a sign of a concrete thing after all, but that thing is not primarily the child's body, or his muscular sensations as such, but the phenomenon of aggressive appropriation, practiced by himself, witnessed in others, and incited and interpreted by a hereditary instinct."¹⁴ On the other hand President Hall found that discovery by the child of his inner organs led to asking whether parents, other children, God, animals, etc., had similar organs. Here then we have illustrated both sides of that process whereby the child defines his self by his world and his world in terms of his self.

The prominent place given to names and nicknames in the child's early sense of his self indicates a further resemblance between the child and primitive mind. The parallelism is even more striking in the belief in metamorphosis common to both. For example, sixty-three girls in Hall's returns expected when they were older to be boys, and fourteen boys to be girls. "This change, however, involved no thought of organs but mainly only of dress. "This of course because the sexual self and the functions of sex organs have not at this age been distinguished. Here the personality is socialized up to the point of social convention. It indicates even in this grotesque form the child's idea of its own plasticity. And is not this after all the kernel of the whole matter? For what is the basis of education if not the plasticity of the child's self and the infinite possibilities of molding it for noble ends? Indeed President Hall concludes his study in somewhat that mood. "These phenomena," he says, "are hard to interpret, but suggest that childhood is generic and full of promise and potency of many kinds of personality and consciousness before the shades of the prison house close in upon it."¹⁵

Heaven may lie about us in our infancy, as Wordsworth claimed; but it is certain that Heaven does not dwell within us during our infancy. Perhaps this is fortunate, for it opens the gates of the infinite universe to the growing child. Hence we are inclined to resent the bathos and sentimentality that strive to make us believe that this world of experience and especially social experience, is the shade of the prison house. It may be that the innocence of the infantile animal or of the imbecile is a good personal asset and the mark of heaven; but it surely is not the mark of the normal human being. For normal children prison doors open outward and release the embryonic personality for its sojourn in free society. They open to force the child out of "vegetative torpor," out of that jelly-fish sort of mysticism which floats unresisting toward insanity, or feeble-mindedness. They force him out into the swirl of persons and events which is to make him man. But why should this process of making man out of the youth cause him to lose his "vision splendid"? What is the youth's vision splendid and why should it "fade into the light of common day"? For the child of fortunate parents this vision is ordinarily one of a world of plenty, a world of love, devotion, service, justice, coöperation. Unfortunately to the child of the slum, the child-laborer, the child of vicious or ignoble parents, comes a vision vastly different, of a world of misery, squalor, fatigue and pain. The first child has been surrounded with comfort, care, loving discipline, opportunities for education; has been trained to love and to serve. What shatters his romance world, his paradise of love and service? What disintegrates his sense of himself as a server, as just, kindly, chivalrous? Simply the rude impact with other youths and men whose dominant idea and therefore whose predominant "self" is that of exploiting, shirking, getting something for nothing, success at any price, brute competition for existence. He is dashed upon the rocks of a false philosophy of egoism which sets man against man as mutually exclusive and fundamentally locked in a death struggle for existence.

But is this tragic smashing of ideals of altruism and service necessary? Is it the inevitable price of maturity? Is a "Social Darwinism," which tortures Darwin's ideas into conformity with preconceived systems of injustice, a true philosophy? Sociology must not be identified with such a philosophy. It may hold for the sub-human world, but Sociology insists that its subject, man, transcends the categories of biology or "natural history," and that man as he stands to-day is far more truly the result of communion, coöperation, common interests than of opposition, warfare, or competition. Empedocles taught that love is the creative and binding principle in the universe, hate the disintegrating force; and Aristotle made friendship the basis of the social order. "Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle" (Kropotkin). Human altruism is a natural instinctive product (K. Pearson). "Each of the greater steps of progress is in fact associated with an increased measure of subordination of individual competition to reproductive or social ends, and of inter-specific competition to coöperative association " (Geddes and Thomson). "The human struggle for existence, differing from the animal fight between independent creatures, and analogous to animal parasitism, is never a factor in selection and progress, but on the contrary is always a potent cause of deterioration and retrogression of the species" (Loria). "The social type inherits the earth. It does not defeat itself. It succeeds" (Hob-house). "The education of the Race like that of the Individual, prepares us gradually to Live for Others" (Comte).¹⁶ The sentiment of loyalty makes a strong appeal to the normal man. The loyalty may be misplaced; it may cleave to illusions; it may fail to discriminate between a ward-boss and a true patriot; but the fact remains that the binding principle is active. Homo lupus hominis is not at all the primal condition of mankind. For instead of being, as commonly supposed, in a constant state of violent and bloody warfare, primitive men are more or less pusillanimous and rather inclined to peace and quiet.

This does not me mean, of course, that competition and selection count for nothing. For war has undeniably been of considerable service in disciplining to group activity and in cross-fertilizing tribal cultures by bringing hostile peoples into close contact with each other's ideas. Nor is struggle to be ruled out of modern civilized life. Social life is now and always has been a ceaseless struggle between invention and convention, the new and the old, between youth and crabbed age; it is in this sense that Giddings is right in calling society a mode of conflict. The only question is where it should legitimately operate. Should men in a world of plenty be obliged to compete for a bare minimum of subsistence? Or for a scanty dole of education? Or should not struggle rather be lifted to a plane of competition between ideas, devices, institutions for developing the world's resources for the common weal? In other words, a struggle between ideas rather than between animals, a struggle over who shall serve rather than who shall shirk or exploit? This sounds like social ethics: perhaps it is, and rather roseate; but at the same time it is sound common sense and sound applied sociology.

Is there any sociologic truth in Emerson's obscure dictum that "the man is but half himself; the other half is his expression"? Or is it merely vague sentiment? An American savage visiting France in Montaigne's time made an observation that is the cry of Socialism to-day; he observed "that there were among us (the French) men full and crammed with all manner of commodities, while, in the meantime, their halves were begging at their doors, lean, and half starved with hunger and poverty; and he thought it strange that these necessitous halves were able to suffer so great an inequality and injustice, and that they did not take the others by the throats or set fire to their houses." Montaigne quaintly explains, "They have a way of speaking in their language to call men the half of one another. "

Such notions of participation of every member of the group in an organic group unity are paralleled by more modern, equally positive, though less naïve, statements of the fact that we are all part and parcel of each other. This deep meaning might easily be read into Plato's Symposium without detracting from its more obvious significance as a symbol of ideal love. The old Christian doctrine of the mystic body of Christ, certain aspects of Professor Royce's pantheism, the Christian Science philosophy of individuals as manifestations of an underlying unity of good, are more or less familiar expressions of the same conception. Perhaps all these ideas, including even Plato's, are children of the ancient Hindu philosophy of man and nature. Quite as positive in their concept of society as a literal organic unity stand out the "organicist" group of contemporary sociologists. However, we need not go to extremes of mysticism or biological analogy in order to establish the sober sociological fact that men are part and parcel of each other. If we once grasp the fact that society is a phenomenon of mental integration and that life is a dynamic unity, the matter is easy. The mind is not given to the child en bloc, but grows through experience, experience largely of persons, social experience. Hence whatever experience is shared by a group of persons weaves them into a common web of unified thought. This is precisely why certain sociologists in looking for the social unit have hit upon, not the individual, the socius (for where is he to be found?), but upon the activity or interest which is common to and which therefore unites a group.

M. Gabriel Tarde in a picturesque passage once wrote: "We are told that our, body is a little condensed air living in the air; might we not say that our soul is a bit of society incarnate living in society? Born of society it lives by means of it."¹⁷ Lest this may seem to be the far-fetched hyperbole of a mystic, let it be said that such doctrine is the utterest commonplace of social psychologists. In plain unmetaphorical language they insist that human minds are not separate but interwoven, that we have no higher life apart from other people, that our mental outfit is not divisible into the social and non-social, simply because it is all social in the largest sense.¹⁸ Even cautious Sir Francis Galton hazards the belief that there " is decidedly a solidarity as well as a separateness in all human and probably in all lives whatsoever: and this consideration goes far, as I think, to establish an opinion that the constitution of the living Universe is a pure theism and that its form of activity is what may be described as coöperative." ¹⁹ It is a barren theory which makes the ability to socialize himself one of the individual's qualities, which, indeed, he may lack. This is to unthink him as man, and to conceive him either as a little lower than man, or as a great stony, unrelated, Monad deity.

It is for this reason that in looking for the principle of societal life we do not need to grub around for some special or recondite "social instinct," "altruistic impulse," or "group faculty," either inherited or injected. The principle lies implicit in man and his development. He cannot become man, a human individual, without at the same time becoming incorporated beyond recall and almost beyond analysis into the mental whole which constitutes society, for the social bond is established and rooted in the development of self-consciousness itself.²⁰

Here we are plumped once more into the problem of the individual versus the group. Is the individual, and therefore his self, merely a basket of fruits gathered from the multitude of trees and shrubs that make up the social orchard? Or is he something besides, say, a separate tree? Is the Individual made for Society or Society made for the Individual? Neither. Which was prior? Again, neither. They are complementary and indispensable to each other. ²¹Yet the individualistic philosophers, and even so modified an individualist as Professor Eucken, charge us unceasingly to remember that the individual is everywhere and always something above and beyond a mere portion of the social whole. He is fundamentally and eternally himself, unique, a member if you please of some higher spiritual order, God's Universal Kingdom. " The individual, " says Eucken, " can never be reduced to the position of a mere member of society, of a church, of a state; notwithstanding all external subordination, he must assert an inner superiority; each spiritual individual is more than the whole external world." On the other hand he apportions to the group its separate unified life above and beyond the individual.²² In another place he reproaches the philosophy of Plotinus because of its isolating tendency, because " there is no path leading from this inwardness back to the wide field of life "; because it recognizes " no inner solidarity between men, no assimilation of another or of the whole into one's own inner being"; because "there is here no inner world encompassing men and forming a bond of union between them."²³

It is idle thus to oppose society to the individual, for several reasons. First, they are simply two ways of looking at the same thing. Again, they are two of perhaps the many ways in which the life process has chosen to express itself, both equally valid and equally useful, both complementary. From a study of biology M. Bergson finds that Nature constantly vibrates between the two poles of individuality and sociality, and at times seems actually to hesitate between the two forms as if to ask whether she shall make a society or an individual.²⁴

In human society and the human individual nature seems to solve the puzzle by creating the individual's real self out of the stuff of society, and, on the other hand, to have trusted to variations in the individual for the constant renewing and freshening of the social mass. The function of society in molding the individual's knowledge is indubitable, as we have already frequently pointed out. The body of social thinking which, with MM. Durkheim and Levy-Bruhl, we may call "collective representations," constrains the individual not only in his sentiments and his will, but even in his very intelligence, his process of knowing, itself. According to such pragmatic conceptions, knowledge is a sort of polling the jury, a matching of stories. A gets a certain experience, technically called a 'reaction'; he goes to B and to C to compare notes; B and C do likewise; those reactions which the consensus of opinion establishes become validated and erected into facts of experience or knowledge. A's ideas without this social reference would have remained vague and inchoate, if indeed they remained at all. But by the very communicating of them—and he must communicate them ²⁵ —they get clipped and pared down to a certain definiteness; their comparison with the ideas of others clears them up still more; if the social reference results in a verdict of approval, then they become collective, socially capitalized, funded in the common social experience. Social reference and approval once secured, the idea becomes fixed, consolidated, crystallized into a conviction. Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est hoc est vere catholicum, etc. This process of concept and language forming Professor Jerusalem calls eine soziale Verdichtung. ²⁶

Most of our life, bodily and mental, goes along according to this sheep-like process. To be sure, there is in every individual thought an element of originality, due to the universal tendency to mutation and variety: that is, every one is at the same time himself and Herr Omnes; he is an "absolutely singular and unrepeatable personality," and withal a bundle of wholesale borrowings and imitations, a "collective self-consciousness." The more of himself, the more he is a heretic and departs from the mere on dit or social-accord standard of truth and knowledge. If the dose of himself be extreme, we have the genius, the scientist, the seer, the perceiver of new verities, the announcer of new ideas, the prophet of new heavens and new earths. But here again the inevitably social character of the knowledge process reappears; for social reference must intervene before the new ideas can be incorporated into the group intelligence to become new convictions. At this point enters the function of education and its opportunity for social control, control not only of sentiments and will, but also of the very stuff and fiber of intelligence as well. And this education will always bear in mind that the social self, character as a social product, does not mean absolute dead level of capacity, that monotonous égalitarianism which used to be the nightmare of thoroughgoing individualists. It merely demands a minimum of effective socializing and admits of unlimited variations in ability and aptitude.

But in addition to common knowledge its correlative, common activity, creates a society out of individuals. If men were purely static, self-sufficing, contemplative, fixed, each like a bronze Buddha upon his separate pedestal, then we might very well talk of absolute, discrete individuals. But men are by nature active, and for the fullest play of their activity require their fellows to act with and upon. And it is really out of this common activity that we get our socialized knowledge and sentiments. Hence group асtivity is the forge blast which fuses the unit selves or persons into the social whole; and conversely it is through this same group activity that the units find their selves and become real persons.

It is perfectly in order to assume, if anybody chooses to do so, that there is a Person-in-itself, akin to the metaphysical abstraction of the thing-in-itself. But neither the assumption nor such a hypothetical being could have any serious value. For, as we have sought to show over and again, the human person has become human and a self-conscious person only through identification with his fellows in human society and through activity with and upon them. Not one of us knows himself as some eternal, colorless person-in-itself, but as a warm, living complex of our social fellows. " It is...the most remarkable outcome of modern social theory—the recognition of the fact that the individual's normal growth lands him in essential solidarity with his fellows, while on the other hand exercise of his social duties and privileges advances his highest and purest individuality. "²⁷

Further, the group activity not only really confers personality upon the individual, but it also actually increases the individual's ability and output. It is frequently assumed that the output of a given group of, say, laborers or school children, is merely the sum of the unit, individual outputs, and that such a sinking of individuals into the mass even lowers the total capacity. But the contrary seems to be true. Dr. Mayer of Würzburg found that the boys of the fifth school year in the people's schools in Würzburg did superior work when in groups than when working as individuals. Another investigator after a careful test of school children in their home work as compared with school group work concluded that for most kinds of work the product in the classroom was superior. Mayer's study indicated that the tendency to distraction is diminished rather than increased by class work. The class acts as a sort of pace-maker; it also contributes certain affective or emotional stimuli. The imaginative stimulus of the group has too often been proved in both primitive and contemporary society to need further argument. Group work through its mental rapport or "class spirit" develops superior concentration and yields not only a larger product but also a better work-spirit. Tests in the psychological laboratories confirm these conclusions. Ergograph and dynamometer experiments show uniformly that when the subject of the experiment is alone he works less, and more painfully, than when others are present. The evolution of industry adds striking testimony to the same fact. Karl Bücher's Arbeit und Rhythmus is full of illustrations of the disciplinary effects of rhythmic concerted action. An excellent example of Bücher's theory occurs in a recent description of Negro labor on the railways of the South. A southern railway official says that a leader must be provided for each gang of workers, and that he must be gifted with a good voice. He uses a chant which enables the men to work in unison. "Every pick rises and falls at the same instant in time with the rhythm of the song of the leader, and it is surprising to note the speed with which the work can be done by this means."²⁸ At Calavan and other places in the Philippine Islands the natives transplant rice to rhythmic tunes on a banjo; this device was introduced by the Spaniards to secure steady and sustained work from their untutored dependents. Such schemes are not by any means mere "speeding-up" devices; for, in addition to securing a larger product, they yield a by-product of pleasure in the process.

We conclude, then, with Professor Burnham, that like the constant peripheral stimulation necessary to keep us awake, " a social stimulus is necessary as an internal condition, as we may say, of consciousness."²⁹ Perhaps we should add that this conclusion holds good in spite of the exaggerated criticism of the group stimulus and its formulation into the bogy of "mob-mind." M. LeBon has recently reiterated his former pronouncements on this subject by saying: " Democratic theories pretend that the isolated individual is nothing, but acquires all his capacities by participating in that entity called the ' people. ' Psychology teaches, on the contrary, that the collective individual is mentally very inferior to the isolated man."³⁰ But it is perfectly evident that, put in this unqualified way, psychology teaches no such thing. It is further apparent that for M. LeBon the group, the collectivity, society, association, always spells Mob. Sound thinking needs both society and solitude; society for stimulus and access to the common heritage of culture; solitude for digestion and elaboration.

But, some one objects, this is determinism. If society furnishes the mold into which our very selves are cast, and furnishes moreover the materials to be poured into the molds, if social organization is essentially an integration of individual wills, what becomes of us, of our personal responsibility, our self-respect, our free will? Well, our sense of personal responsibility, our sense of self-respect, our sense of free will are created and developed in precisely the same way that we achieve a sense of our self in general. They come through activity with and upon our fellows, through experience, through imitation, through trial and error. But does this not destroy the moral order by putting a premium upon irresponsibility? Not in the least; for to have a stable society the idea of coöperation, of social service, of social responsibility, if they have not grown normally into the individual's sense of self must be incorporated into it through proper social discipline and treatment. Responsibility to some supra-mundane moral order is replaced by obligation to develop and maintain an efficient social " self. "

Since the mind is a whole both in its feeling of itself and in its expression in the activity of any given moment, there is always reserved to it the feeling of freedom which is the only essential point to this ancient controversy. "As a man thinketh in his heart so is he. " The suggestions to thought may come from our social fellows, from God, from the remotest corner of the cosmos, from other orders of experience not yet grasped by our workaday intelligence. Yet in coming to the mind, who can deny that they cause, determine the mind, whether in its knowing phase, or its feeling, or its willing? They determine not only what we are, but what we do. In this sense we are free, and in this sense only: we are free to do as we please, but we must please what we are. We learn to speak by the exercise of will, so we are told. But my Chinese friend, Mr. Fong Sec, who came to America as a boy, might have willed his life away willing to learn English, but if he had not thrown himself among English speaking people, or read English books, or attended public schools and an American university, he could not have spoken a word of English though he lived as long as a Chinese sage. Furthermore, when Mr. Sec wanted to return to China mere willing could not recall his Cantonese dialect. He was to all intents and purposes an American. He was free to speak Cantonese, true enough; but he had to re-become Cantonese by hard study before he could regain the tongue. I wonder what the slum child is free to do? When, for example, did the freedom of Jacob Beresheim—New York tenement dweller and boy murderer—begin? Only, if we may judge from Mr. Riis ' story (in his " Battle with the Slum "), when the law yanked him out of the wretched conditions that created him a murderer. The whole trend of modern thinking upon the causes of poverty is to sweep away such concepts of freedom. Growth in the understanding of the nature and causes of feeblemindedness has also forced a reconsideration of the problem of freedom.

Now, since, as we have already seen, our feelings, ideas, sense of self, are social products, in the fullest sense of the word we are socially determined. In this process we really achieve a wider freedom—the freedom that comes from thinking widely and feeling deeply. Our own petty designs and choices are enlarged to the highest measure of our group. Our own limited free will acquires tremendous significance from its federation with that of our fellows. Freedom is a relative term and implies law. As we shall see later, the more primitive men are, the narrower their range of interests and the more they are the sport of natural forces. As their thought horizon widens an almost infinitely greater number of thought combinations and choices become possible. This is freedom increased, in no mean sense. By the same process, and it is a social process, man's control over nature through reading law into it adds to his sum of freedom. Therefore we are justified in saying that the sense of the self as a conscious free agent is, like other aspects of the self, largely if not wholly a social creation.

To some minds physical determinism, that is to say heredity, crops out as an objection to social determination of the self. But no one has been able to show that personality, character, is inherited en bloc. It is the merest balderdash to assume that men are born conservative or radical. They are both; as infants they resent changes which discommode their tiny comforts, and at the same time are greedy for new experiences even at the cost of temporary scratches or bruises. Again, the most ardent hereditarian would not risk the absurd contention that the child carries in him all the elements of his mature self. Whether along with his stock of truncated and rudimentary instincts the child brings with him into the world also a bundle of quite definite and specific mental qualities and aptitudes which are only different aspects of physical predispositions is a debatable question by no means easy to prove. Shakespeare was able to prove it only by sacrificing probability to dramatic effect and to his favorite thesis "blood will tell" (as in Cymbeline, Twelfth Night, Winter's Tale). That physical and mental elements have so combined to give the child before birth a certain mental "set" or temperament we may assume as likely. But in the same breath we must assume, too, that this set or temperament may be, and a thousand to one will be, overborne and modified by his social environment. Social suggestion and habit (which Dr. Jordan calls the "higher heredity") will dissolve hereditary granite. Heredity is its own undoing. For while transmitting "characters" it transmits also the impetus by which the characters are modified or annulled.

Indeed it is not too much to say that we only possess our inheritance by earning it. Goethe, while believing fully in the heredity of mental aptitudes and tastes, delivers himself of this apparent paradox: " What thou hast inherited from the fathers, labor for, in order to possess it. " Why? Because our mental and physical inheritances become really ours only as we actually develop them. The infant's body, however complete, would remain a flabby mass unless he began to exercise and develop himself by imitative and premonitory plays. His mind would remain, too, a vague, schematic outfit of half-emerged instincts unless he completed them by social activity. In spite of Galton's elaborate attempt to prove the inheritance of mental superiorities, it appears from fuller evidence that the real determining factor in perpetuating a strain of intelligence was social inheritance, the inheritance of superior opportunities for maintaining intellectual preeminence. It seems pretty generally proved that the distribution of ability does not coincide with classes. The inheritance of such ability, or superior capacity, is, to say the very least, so questionable that it must yield a rather shaky foundation for any broad and sound social policy.³¹ It breaks down also in the commonest affairs of daily life; people with a heavy baggage of family pride who assume that they are to the manner born are frequently the rudest, most ungracious, and ill-mannered. Good manners are made, not born.

To the common objection that no two children in a large family are alike it is proper to answer that no two of these children are placed in the same environment. The first child comes bathed in nuptial love. The second takes its place in a family of four instead of three; the third finds himself a member of a group of five. To say nothing of the differing possibilities of experience based simply on the mathematical principles of permutations and combinations, the fourth and fifth children find their parents older, less romantic, more driven by exigencies of employment or social getting-on, perhaps haunted by the fear of death, widowhood, or failing income. In every child, then, we should expect marked variations quite independent of their common physical heredity and of variations in the germ plasm itself.³² In so far as bodily feelings— somatic consciousness—form a part of the sense of self, it is accountable to physical heredity. Physical heredity seems to furnish the vase, but social heredity pours in the contents. We are beginning to realize, too, that even the body is not nearly so fixed by heredity as we were wont to presume. Changes in diet, climate, beliefs in disease, faith in the recuperative power of mind, elimination of worry, pressure of fatigue, germ damage through alcohol, febrile disease or temporary subnormalities of the parent at the time of conception, all of these things in either child or adult can break the mold of genuine heredity. It is perhaps too early to pin our faith to such results as those apparently attained by Prof. Boas in his anthropological measurements of immigrants to New York.³³ But even if his thousands of Jews and Sicilians of the first and second generation in response to their new environment did not actually become so much rounder or broader headed, or so much taller, or so much heavier, as the figures seem to show, still they indicate that something physically important happened. And the very fact that the experiment was made proves that we believed more in plasticity than our faith in heredity would permit us to avow. It is perhaps not impertinent to point out that if the Italian or Russian Jew leaves his old self at Messina or Odessa or Ellis Island and proceeds to achieve an American "self," it does not matter much whether his skull gets broader or not. If, however, to become dolicocephalous will help along the growth of his new self, so much the better, and we welcome the calipers and yardsticks of the anthropologists.

Notes