Self as a Social Product (cont)

by: Arthur James Todd

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

1918

The MacMillan Co. New York, NY.

"Every cherished idea is a self." (Cooley)

Having established that the self grows and can be molded, perhaps we are in a position to ask, what is a socially valuable self and how may it best be grown? One of the greatest religious teachers of the nineteenth century declared that the "human self must be evangelized." But what is the objective point of such evangelization? In the first place, do we want a society made up of self-less or unselfed beings? No, for we should have jelly and not society. We need individual selves well developed and active, for somewhat the same reason that life achieves greater flexibility through separate ribs, joints, articulation, than when it becases itself in the bony prison of the crustacean. Human society is not Nirvana and has scant use for the hermit or the self-less nihilist. Such selflessness, far from being unselfish, is the height of selfishness. It is that sort of aesthetic individualism which seems to have contributed to Greek decadence, and to the feeble civic life of Catholic Europe in the Middle Ages. Love to one's neighbor does not mean annihilation of one's self, but simply the recognition that self and neighbor are fundamentally one. To deny one's self is merely to retire from the field and do nothing. Such renunciation is folly, for life is dynamic and insists that we act out our social nature; otherwise we must shrivel and die. For this reason the widest opportunity for the cultivation of Persönlichkeit must be demanded and granted; but not for the adornment of a perfumed ego: the I in us must be realized and cultivated through the realization and cultivation of the I in others. But through it all the self must be permitted to assert and express itself normally; otherwise it will degenerate into colorless asceticism or monasticism on the one hand, or explode into a wild riot of anarchic individualism on the other.

It is not by any means necessary for the cultivation of a valuable self to march with Tolstoi in the rejection of all personal service, provided we are equally ready to render personal service. But it is doubtful whether at our present stage of economic and social development we either could or should revive primitive ideas of personal service. Economic self-sufficiency is out of the question; the hands of the clock will not turn back. There are of course—as the Social Settlements have proved—many avenues yet neglected for the exercise of personal good neighborliness. Yet, after all, in the effort to create opportunities for the full development of everybody's self it is possible that what the poor need nost from the well-to-do and cultured classes is not mere "old-fashioned neighborliness," but better citizenship; not so nuch a self-denying altruism of volunteer personal service as an income altruism that will create and maintain more favorable living conditions. The Friendly Visitor might often do more effective service as the citizen who refuses to buy "sweated' clothes or finery. It is conceivable that if working and living conditions are made tolerable, acquaintance and friendship will spring up spontaneously among those who are natural neighbors, who are thrown into ordinary industrial and social relations. For suspicion is eliminated and mutual confidence enlisted, without which there can never be the slighest basis for real neighborliness. Good will must always rest upon social justice. Only a sentimental, feudal sort of egotism will insist upon maintaining that ranging of classes which will permit of Lord and Lady Bountiful as the type of the good neighbor. Not alms, but a friend, says the new charity. But that friend will express his friendship in efforts to eliminate the need of alms or charity of any sort. The democracy of selves for which we contend and dream has no place for patron or pauper.

If I were asked to state in two words the mark of a socially valuable "self," I should say without hesitation efficient imagination. For without imagination we can have no broad and abiding sympathy; without it we are mere clansmen or tribesmen, or narrow members of a guild, trades-union or profession; or we lock ourselves in by our own firesides as momentary patterns of domestic virtue and like Meredith's Egoist chant to our lovely bride, "You and I and the world outside!" But to attain that Olympian sort of sympathy which will overleap the boundaries of craft or class or country and create new worlds out of old requires a vigorous responsive imagination. I believe we have not utilized a tithe of the possibilities of developing an imaginative self. Social reformers, teachers, preachers, capture the imagination for social service, and behold the new world!

Lockhart in his life of Scott says that Sir Walter once remarked in the course of a conversation on the high sentiments often expressed by uneducated persons: "We shall never learn to feel and respect our real calling and destiny, unless we have taught ourselves to consider everything as moonshine compared with the education of the heart. For out of the heart flow imagination and sentiment wherewith to meet the issues of life. A notable Danish sociologist recently wrote: "Moral evolution has consisted almost wholly in the increasing liberation of the imagination."¹ W. E. H. Lecky in tracing a large share of immorality to lack of imagination follows it up with a plea for education as the means of increasing morality by enlarging the imagination. "If our benevolent feelings are then the slaves of our imaginations, if an act of realization is a necessary antecedent and condition of comparison, it is obvious that any influence that augments the range and power of this realizing faculty is favorable to the amiable virtues, and it is equally evident that education has in the-highest degree this effect.² Whether expressed in so many words or not, this is evidently what Superintendent Brockway had in mind when contending for the reformatory effects of intellectual education at Elmira.³ And as Mr. Wells points out, if we are going to arrest our present pretty clear drift towards revolution or revolutionary disorder it must not be through training a governing class to get the better of an argument or the best of a bargain'; it must be through laying hold of the imaginations of "this drifting, sullen and suspicious multitude, which is the working body of the country."⁴

If we are justified in interpreting Socrates' axiom that knowledge is virtue, as meaning that complete, illuminated knowledge which by imagination sees through, behind, and around things and thus perforce expresses itself in right conduct, we are likewise justified in saying that much, perhaps most crime, is the result of limited, unimaginative knowledge. Likewise selfishness as a mental and social quality is always the result of a certain mental squint or astigmatism, defective imagination, especially inability to imagine one's "self" in its correct proportions and in its true relations with others' selves. For if we once grasp the idea that society is simply the aggregate of our images of each other, it is easy to see that imagination is the prerequisite not only to social reform, to that ideal of society we dream of, but also to any sort of societal life at all. Indeed for my fellows to exist in the slightest degree for me as social beings they must be visualized ; and no form of social control is possible without this constant imaging of one's fellows and their presence. But this is merely to reduce my own sense of my self as a social person to the same terms, for, as we have repeatedly observed, I get my self only by observing others and by comparing these observations of ego and alter in my imagination. It is not too much to say, then, that a man is just so much of a man as his sympathies are wide; "what a person is and what he can understand or enter into through the life of others are very much the same thing." Imagination is the social periscope through which we can see around the rough corners of our fellows. It is just this ability to put one's self into others' places, to enter into the life of our fellows, to slip, with Balzac into the very skins of others, that makes the great artist, man of letters, poet, lover of men, or real constructive social reformer. For it is not some special quality of altruism or sentimentality, but simple imagination and its correlative, kindly sympathy, both growing out of a rich, comprehensive, and coherent experience, that form the basis of social ethics and of serious social reform. It is likewise the basis of our whole social organization if we accept Aristotle's maxim that "friendship or love is the bond which holds states together."

Foreign missions, quite aside from our opinion as to their religious and economic value, appeal to us at least on the score of their imaginative stimulus. Adam Smith observed that we are more moved by our neighbor's suffering from a corn on his great toe than by the starvation of millions in China. And Leslie Stephen generalizes this experience into the maxim, "My interests are strongest where my power of action is greatest." Instead of 'power of action' he might better have said 'power of visualization.' With the growing world-organization of trade and means of communication the way begins to open for wider circles of visualization, action, and sympathy. The man who can fully visualize Central Africa or the Marquesas while not neglecting in imagination and fact his next door neighbor or the child of the city slum is just so much more the largehearted citizen of the cosmos, member of a world society. Such an experiment as the First Universal Races Congress which met in London, 1911, is a concrete instance of the power of imaginative sympathy to pave the way to better international and interracial understandings and policies; hence a wider conception of the "self." It is perhaps impossible to measure the impulse to religious tolerance and breadth which has sprung from the appeal to the imagination offered at the World's Congress of Religions at the Chicago World's Fair. Race prejudice and religious prejudice are impossible when my imagination is working at its best, for every man is my brother, is identified with my self, so long as I can conceive him without antipathy; and the chances are ten to one that if I take the trouble to learn of and about him my antipathy vanishes. The maxim tout comprendre tout pardonner reduces to mere tautology — one equals one — for to understand all leaves nothing to pardon. And to tolerate is the beginning of understanding.

Our sense of self, then, grows richer as we perceive constantly newer and wider possibilities of conduct, through either direct contact or through imaginary relationship with persons. It holds equally true for sociology and psychology that our self grows only in proportion to our world. We know "our self' only as we know our "other self." Hence the absolute necessity for wide experience. The man who wears blinders of indifference or prejudice is the man who knows little of the world, therefore but little of himself, and becomes what we call narrow-minded. Such being the case, the wider the range of alters the larger and richer the give and take which is the essence of ego-building, as also of social consciousness. Personality must acquire a three-dimensional activity. The third dimension, depth, can only come from wide experience. Two-dimensional personality is merely a reflecting surface, mostly copy .with but little practice or invention, and fit only for automatic, suggested, or reflex action.

But where shall this wide experience be culled? It begins with the mother, and with the family, obviously enough. But is the family, as some have supposed, a sufficiently wide pasture ground for the raising of a full-grown personality—a socially efficient self? Does it offer that wide and varied experience of persons and things requisite for mature intelligence and conduct? Does it provide for that expression of Good Will which is ascribed to scientists and socialists — their conquest over the meanness of concealment, their systematic devotion of themselves to large impersonal ends?

Professor Giddings in his presidential address before the American Sociological Society in St. Louis, 1910, said: "Now, habits are acquired, we say, by doing things, or thinking things many times over. That is true, but it is not all. The repetitions that make up habit are imitations; they are copies of models or examples. Many of our elemental and most useful habits are imitations of parents, but, plainly if we imitated parents only, there would be no national traits, and in the strict sense of the word, no nations. There would be only some millions of families, each abiding by its own mental and moral law. National habits, and therefore national traits and character, are copies of those relatively conspicuous models that are widely imitated, irrespective of kinship; imitated locally at first, perhaps, but at length throughout a population."

Albeit a strong tendency among experimental psychologists to discount the imitation theory, this still remains a fair statement of the case for which we have been arguing, namely, the need of a rich and varied pasturage for that process of imitation and practice which shapes the self. Where is it to be found? Manifestly the family limits by its numbers the opportunities for the child's practice. His position is largely one of subordination. His means are largely therefore copy, and not its necessary correlative, practice. His very imitation of his parents is in part copying second-hand copy in so far as they reflect the larger movements of the social life. This second-hand copy is no doubt valuable in the beginning, for it is selected from an enormous mass which would only serve to confuse the child's indiscriminating sense of values were he projected immediately into it. It is a short cut and would be supremely valuable if the selections were always wise and socially sound. Unfortunately they are not always so, for parenthood does not bring with it, per se, wisdom and capacity, and parental love is by no means self-less; it is appropriative and frequently mixed with procreative pride. But were the parents ever so wise and just in their selection, there must come a time when the child shall have done with mere second-hand imitation and have access to original sources.

An education and experience confined to the limits of familial life would be "incest" just as surely as the most flagrant physical in-breeding. As John Locke put it, such circumscribed experience yields a pretty traffic with known correspondents in some little creek; but it hinders venturing out into the great ocean of knowledge. Life is largely stress, but family life is consciously opposed to strain and conflict, or at least offers only limited opportunities for it. By its very physical proximity and intimacy, family life gives full swing to imitation, both conscious and unconscious. It is, therefore, essentially conservative. It tends to stagnate, to recapitulate, to venerate the past, to dis. count novelty, experiment, and adventure, to encourage submissive receptivity instead of independent activity. Home is rather an ark of refuge than a laboratory. It is rather the place whither one retires to enjoy the fruits of his intellectual rotation of crops than the experiment station which would discover the value of and insist upon such a rotation. The strength of family life and its social utility should lie in its exercise of sentiment, of sympathy, rather than of mere intellectual interest. But so long as marriage and family life savor so strongly of custom, law, property, and sensuality, and so little of healthy sentiment and social responsibility, they are hardly in position to outfit children with "selves' broadly conceived, warm with sentiment, and socially valuable.

Here we may be permitted to record a doubt as to the validity of Sir Francis Galton's claims for parental education. He says:⁵ "Those teachings that conform to the natural aptitudes of the child leave much more enduring marks than others. Now both the teachings and the natural aptitudes of the child are usually derived from its parents. They are able to understand the ways of one another more intimately than is possible to persons not of the same blood, and the child instinctively assimilates the habits and ways of thought of its parents. Its disposition is 'educated' by them in the true sense of the word. That is to say, the parents are best able to determine the child's self.

But even granting that parents by the fact of their relationship alone enjoy any peculiar advantage of reciprocal knowledge and understanding, it is still far from true that the result in self-and-other-self-building, measured in terms of social efficiency, would attain a maximum. There is no advantage ipso facto, to the child or to society, in assimilating the "habits and ways of thought of its parents." There is rather a distinct disadvantage save where society is Utopian, or ranged on a rigid caste basis. A narrow family feeling breeds selfishness, and a selfishness peculiarly repellent and difficult to extirpate; for, as Professor Mackenzie observes, "The evil spirit is there masquerading as an angel of light.'⁶ It is absolutely essential for a growing man to get outside his family to achieve that endowment of sympathetic imagination which alone can deliver him from the mental warping of a narrowed education. Mr. Wells shows clearly how this sort of mental "incest" causes a great English family to think of England as "a world of happy Hatfields, cottage Hatfields, villa Hatfields, Hatfields over the shop, and Hatfields behind the farm yard, wickedly and wantonly assailed and interfered with by a band of weirdly discontented men"— social reformers.⁷

But we cannot even grant that parents understand their children better than others outside the family circle can hope to. The reverse is often true. And the reason is this, that rarely do we find a person, unless he has been specially trained in psychology, who can recognize in the child the genesis of traits and characteristics which will mature into those possessed by the parents. Even if he could, prejudices of various sorts would enter to confuse his understanding and treatment of the problem. Let the the reader recall, for example, Meredith's Richard Feverel : Feverel senior is a perfect illustration of Galton's thesis; and the complete breakdown of his educational policy, through misreading the boy's character, together with its tragic results for Feverel junior, quite as perfectly illustrate the criticism here offered.⁸

To that wider process—definite, conscious Social Education — we shall have to look for the creation and maintenance of socially valuable and efficient "selves." We cannot here go into any details of what this process of Social Education involves. The key to it is simply this : to develop a dominant idea of the self as devoted to the building up of a rich and efficient personality in terms of others' equally rich and efficient personalities. In other words, a dominant self pledged to social justice, to the creation of opportunities for the free development of all others' selves. Or to phrase it still differently, a self conceived in the most ardent, flexible, and intelligent sympathy, determined to express that sympathy in brotherhood - literally and consistently.⁹ It is primarily a problem of capturing the imagination, of creating centers of imitation, and of injecting a new idea into the mores; that is, it is a problem of making good will "good form' in the best sense. Can this be done? It can and must.¹⁰ We have already seen how, under a stress of competition, an exaggerated sense of property and other disagreeable phases or corners of the self have developed. The self may be identified with the "cause'" or aim for which one works or in which one is interested. One's philosophy, one's creed, class, party, business becomes literally himself : witness the feeling of outraged personal honor when one's class morals, party honor, etc., are impugned. I have heard an enthusiastic bank messenger, sixteen years old, after two weeks of service speak familiarly of "our' bank, our directors, our profits, etc.

Ribot says: "Nothing is more common or better known than the momentary appropriation of the personality by some intense and fixed idea. As long as this idea occupies consciousness, we may say without exaggeration that it constitutes the individual. The obstinate pursuit of a problem, invention, or creation of any kind represents a mental state in which the whole personality has been drained for the profit of a single idea.¹¹ Lowell expressed the same idea felicitously in his poem Longing. ("The thing we long for, that we are, etc.)

Such a dominant idea can become an idee fixe or hobby, so that a man may be defined by his hobby. Sterne's Uncle Toby is a classic example in point.¹²

But our own dominant self need have nothing of the dangerous character of the idee fixe, nor of the grotesque extravagance and annoyance of the hobby. In the doctrine of the dominant social self-idea there lies no suggestion of fixity. The socially valuable self is not rigid. It may vary from day to day. It may achieve and hold as its right that sacred inconsistency for which Emerson argued so eloquently as the essential mark of real life and thinking. But with our social self as with Emerson, the variations and inconsistencies will always be within the range of what is socially good and valuable. To Emerson it was never an inconsistent balancing or wavering between what was right and what was wrong. By no means. His course was always toward the true and valuable. If he tacked hither and yon, if he seemed to waver and hesitate, it was merely in the attempt to choose the Best from out several possible Merely Goods. Hence in the long run, sub specie cternitas, so to speak, we are consistent when we constantly manifest as our dominant self that which socially is most valuable and efficient, whatever temporary day to day variations may appear. Even the tides of the sea show marked diurnal variations; yet, in polar seas where the variations appear most considerable, nobody would doubt the general consistency of their course.

It is only this general consistency for good that modern efficient religion demands. Professor Peabody, for example, writes: "the Christian rich man . . . is not hard in business and soft in charity, but of one fiber throughout. His business is a part of his religion, and his philanthropy is a part of his business. He leads his life, he is not led by it.¹³ A cross section of the modern Big-Business sinner reveals such a general unsoundness of fiber, hypertrophy here, rottenness there, ossification yonder, that our young radicals are clamoring for a social policy that will administer heroic remedies to heal his unsoundness and force him to be of one fiber throughout.

The self struggling for life for others as a "ruling passion comes nearest this ideal of consistent good. For, if we are to believe Dr. Van Dyke, in all of us that amount to anything (or at least are worth writing about) there is a ruling passion which weaves "the stuff of human nature into patterns wherein the soul is imaged and revealed." Any one of the ordinary ruling passions, romantic love, music, nature, honor, money, pride, children, loyalty, revenge— those of which Dr. Van Dyke writes— requires to be disciplined and subjected to great broad rules of social justice and decency. But the self dominated by the idea that it is part and parcel of its fellows and must work out the salvation of all together lest all fail, has no need of elaborate checks and disciplines. It finds poise and discipline in the inertia of other possible dominant ideas, potential selves, and in the drag-weight of bodily consciousness. Its stimulation and its safety-valve lie alike in the difficulty of its enterprise. And the enterprise becomes all the more difficult with the growing variety and complexity of our interests and experience, or with the delicate sensibility of a highly cultivated, keenly appreciative soul. Henri Frédéric Amiel was such a soul and here is his confession : "This inner identity, this unity of conviction, is all the more difficult the more the mind analyzes, discriminates, and foresees. It is difficult, indeed, for liberty to return to the frank unity of instinct."¹⁴

But will the dominant idea or ruling passion of the social self obliterate the other pleasant and possible selves—the music lover, the poet, the wealth-producer, the man of honor, the nature worshiper? Not in the least. "But seek ye first the Kingdom of God and . . . all these things shall be added unto you." The Kingdom of God—justice, good-will—by insisting on the socializing of opportunity for all to enjoy these things, insures them absolutely for me. Heine's demand for Zuckererbsen fir jederman means also sugar peas for me. So that if you choose to call identifying myself with my fellows and seeking to cooperate in hearty good will with them, losing my life, very well; but the fact still remains that in so doing I find it in deed and in truth. And what is this but formulating into a conscious policy what humanity, and the animal and vegetable world as well, have been doing unconsciously for eons as the price of evolution? The principle of commensality runs through all nature. Take, for example, the plant and animal life of the desert. There is an unconscious, but no less real, mutual understanding between plant and plant and even between plant and animal. Plant shades and feeds animal; animal digs and fertilizes for plant. It may be that misery loves companionship, but it is certain that the harsh conditions of desert life originate and enforce a solidarity between flora and fauna which not only alleviates their misery but saves them from extinction.¹⁵

But we need not go so far to illustrate this principle. Every loaf of bread, every ounce of meat, every flagon of wine or milk embodies this fundamental law of the struggle for service of others. If some one objects that division of labor, not mutuality, is emphasized here, I answer that it is our business to elevate mutuality to the focus of consciousness where it may be brought to white heat for the service of humanity. For it would be easy to show that mere division of labor leads to the most iron clad sort of egotism and selfishness, and becomes a principle of retrogression instead of progress, even in the economic sense alone.

But what sanctions exist, powerful enough to make this service sense-of-self dominant? Any regnant interest can only be displaced by a stronger interest through what Seeley called the expulsive power of a new affection. Will religion alone, as Mr. Benjamin Kidd thinks, furnish the motive for this subordination of the self to social ends? Is the problem, after all, how to get men to become eunuchs for the Kingdom of God's sake? Is it not rather a problem of self-realization and identification with fellow men? If this is so, is'it not possible to secularize the process? Can one not realize and live out his social self without the leverage of some supernatural concept of the self? I believe we can. But merely to substitute philosophy for religion will not bring it generally to pass. Perhaps we may yet design a philosophy of service which will carry us far on the way. It will be difficult, however, to reach the great masses by any made-to-order system of philosophy. Perhaps even a made-to-order religion such as is now being devised by the governing classes for Japan would offer stronger sanctions. It is not improbable that shorn of its grotesqueries and absolutism, Comte's Religion of Humanity might work; for it appealed to sentiment even more than to intellect, and the sentiment was social and healthy. Yet there is more of promise in such a religious movement as the Bahaists. The secret of its marvelous growth in the past fifty years seems to lie in its elimination of elaborated dogma and in its concentration of intellect and feelings upon the two fundamental precepts of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of men. The test of the sincerity and power of this movement is that under most trying and complex racial or religious antagonisms (as in India or Turkey) it has actually made the theory of brotherhood a living social fact.

Dill tells us, that despite the influence of Roman philosophy upon the legislation of the Antonines, and its practical efforts to give support and guidance to moral life and to refashion the old paganism so as to make it a real spiritual force, it failed to touch the people as a whole. It failed "as it will probably tall until some tar-oft age, to find an anodyne for the spiritual distresses of the mass of men. It might hold up the loftiest ideal of conduct; it might revive the ancient gods in new spiritual power; it might strive to fill the interval between the remote Infinite Spirit and the life of man with a host of mediating and succouring powers. But the effort was doomed to failure. It was an esoteric creed, and the masses remained untouched by it. They longed for a Divine light, a clear, authoritative voice from the unseen world."¹⁶ It is the longing of even strong-minded men of science for this clear, authoritative voice from the unseen that gives the church and dogmatic religion its age-long hold. Hence we are not surprised to find Mr. Chatterton-Hill claiming that it is the Church which embodies the supra-social principles of integration and constitutes that solidarity which alone can secure adequate social adaptation.¹⁷ From the same loom comes the social philosophy of such young English Neo-Catholics as G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. The former's criticism of Wells' view that selfishness need not be eternal is typical. Wells does not believe in original sin. Chesterton does; in fact, he holds that an examination of the human soul shows original sin "almost the first' thing to be believed in'; and that "a permanent possibility of selfishness arises from the mere fact of having a self, and not from any accidents of education or ill-treatment. . .. The weakness of Utopias is this, that they take the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones. They first assume that no man will want more than his share, and then are very ingenious in explaining whether his share will be delivered by motor car or balloon.¹⁸ It is perfectly evident that Mr. Chesterton is here conceiving you and me as possessing a self much as a child cleaves to his penny savings bank. The self and the bank are things given once for all, do not change, and must be given away or lost as a whole. But we have already demonstrated almost ad nauseam how the self is not a fixed entity but a social becoming. The point to such reactionary criticism is therefore turned. And the critic who holds such a theory of the self or selfishness is simply the victim of what Dr. Washington Gladden calls Ptolemaic sociology.

We prejudice our chances of realizing our ideal of the "social self" if we neglect altogether the sanctions of either religion or philosophy. But the final basis of any hope in Social Education must be laid on definite, conscious programs of training in socializing activity. "Education, habit, and the cultivation of the sentiments,'' wrote Mill, "will make a common man dig or weave for his country as readily as fight for his country." There is no need for beating tom-toms or strutting or straining in high tragedy to train children to devote themselves heartily and simply to humdrum unsensational doing for others. For human nature is already biased toward service. The psychologists tell us that there exists in all normal people a genuine instinct (as instincts go) for seeing others well off and happy. There is no reason whatever, short of human stupidity and inertia, why the child in school should not be given opportunity to act and to realize himself as a cooperator, as a social self devoted to the service of his mates. We have the machinery, the plant, the pedagogical systems. It makes very little difference after all whether you vote Froebel or Signora Montessori for your children. If the purpose and spirit animating the system is that of social service the name counts for naught.

It is possible to believe so far in the James-Lange theory of the emotions that if the school will apply itself to training the child to act as a social person instead of as an in sulated individual, sufficient unto himself, he will soon develop the feeling of himself as a social self ; this will offer him a new and compelling sanction for acting socially; the new actions by a sort of snowball process pile up and intensify the social feelings; and so on indefinitely until the social self becomes a firmly fixed habit : the doer of good deeds feels himself a good-deed-doer; good-will becomes second nature. Our species, more than any other, as Comte said, needs duties to generate emotions. Max Beerbohm's delightful little allegory of The Happy Hypocrite illustrates this process. A dissolute young lord smitten by a noble and sincere love for a beautiful maiden puts on the waxen mask of a young saint to win her. His hypocrisy succeeds better than he had planned, for it compels him to renounce his evil ways and to make restitution. At a terrible crisis later the mask is torn off, and lo! beneath it the face is discovered molded to the noble lineaments of the mask. Three thousand years ago the Upanishads taught explicitly this very doctrine."Now as a man is like this or like that, according as he acts and according as he behaves, so will he be — a man of good acts will become good, a man of bad acts, bad. He becomes pure by pure deeds, bad by bad deeds."¹⁹ Behold how nature triumphs over herself, and the leopard changes his spots. The precise point to be seized now is that since James warned us that we may become hardened into old fogies at twenty-five, we must catch our leopards as cubs if we would change their'spots effectively.

As a half-way measure, until schools, churches, homes, and other social institutions become infused by the new spirit of socialized effort and consciously work to develop socialized "selves," other organizations for stimulating "social service" may spontaneously arise to prepare the way. Some years ago, for example, the Agenda Club and the Nobodies Club were organized in London for this precise purpose. They are twentieth century Anglo-Saxon orders of chivalry, samurai divested of medievalism, with the avowed purpose of organizing and directing into practical and useful channels the mass of vague idealism which is wasted for want of some such form of direction. Human nature may for a long time to come need the props of religion and formulated codes of duties (as in fraternities and castes like the samurai), for the attainment of its socialized sense of self; but we have the surest grounds for believing that through rational education it will come in time to more spontaneous realization of itself and be able to discard every suggestion of priggishness or condescension.

Let us now review briefly the ground we have traveled in this study. The kernel of the whole matter is that human nature is not a fixed quantity. It is infinitely diverse and infinitely malleable; infinitely sensitive to change. It is a weathercock; it is thistledown rather than the fixed star or adamant we are urged to believe. It is not altogether the nature of things; human nature is modifiable by human will, as Lowes Dickinson reminds us. This we saw clearly in primitive men. Their mystical and elastic concepts of their "persons," their identification of self with the group, cosmic powers and processes, the universal belief in metamorphosis, "possession," reincarnation, "contagion of qualities," indicate historically and genetically a sound basis for our belief that the self is a function of the will, and is socially determined. From psychology we gathered the tact that we are a punaie or potential selves and attain unity through unified activity; that a dominant activity will build up and color a dominant self; that the social self is the real self because the idea of self as a member of a coherent group becomes a dominant idea in all normal persons. Social psychology and sociology show us how this social self is built up out of social experience; how social life furnishes not only the mold but even the very materials that are poured into it for the casting of a social self; how it is no mere metaphor to insist that through the meaning of "us" we learn of "me," and that the self is thus a social product. We are all of us part and parcel of each other. And it is the very community of our selves (the old "Communion of the Saints') that has hauled us up out of the Eocene pit and made us men out of protoplasm. This identification of our selves with our fellows we found to be a real gain in breadth and freedom, instead of a suicidal crushing of our own wills and personalities. The key to such an identification of self with other-self as would be socially valuable we discovered to be " efficient imagination," the power to tolerate, to sympathize with, and to visualize others' selves. But such an elastic imagination requires a wide range of social experience which in our opinion can come only from a wider definition and practice of education; in other words, from social education. And in social education we find the means ready to hand for that molding and fashioning of the sense of self which is the prerequisite to any conscious plan of progress towards the new worlds of which we dream. Through social education men will realize and actually live out that prime social law long ago glimpsed by the Roman Emperor-sage: that they were born for the service and benefit of each other. The method, so far as it can be compressed into a single phrase, must be to develop in the child's mind the dominating thought of himself as a contributing personality, and to project this dominant concept upon the plane of imagination.

Thus have we accepted frankly the challenge that human nature is forever fixed and therefore unadapted to social betterment. Of the two ways of looking at the problem of society and social change (the individual on the one hand, the mass and its environment on the other), we have now finished the discussion of the personal element in controlled or purposive social change, namely the problem of the human self and its manipulation. We must now try to find out the meaning of social change; to give a precise definition to social change conceived as progress or betterment, to determine along what path or paths human personality can best express itself in order to secure improvement. This will involve a critical analysis of what the word progress covers and the various tests by which it may be identified.

Notes