§ 3.
Now, I ask the reader to consider very carefully how the Socialist movement, using that expression now in its wider sense, stands to this very vague and very real outcome of social evolution, the Collective Mind; what it is really aspiring to do in that Collective Mind.
One has to recognize that this mind is at present a mind in a state of confusion, full of warring suggestions and warring impulses. It is like a very disturbed human mind, it is without a clear aim, it does not know except in the vaguest terms what it wants to do, it has impulses, it has fancies, it begins and forgets. In addition it is afflicted with a division within itself that is strictly analogous to that strange mental disorder, which is known to psychologists as multiple personality. It has no clear conception of the whole of itself, it goes about forgetting its proper name and address. Part of it thinks of itself as one great being, as, let us say, Germany; another thinks of itself as Catholicism, another as the White Race, or Judæa. At times one might deem the whole confusion not so much a mind as incurable dementia, a chaos of mental elements, haunted by invincible and mutually incoherent fixed ideas. This you will remember is the gist of that melancholy torso of irony, Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet.
In its essence the Socialist movement amounts to this; it is an attempt in this warring chaos of a collective mind to pull itself together, to develop and establish a governing idea of itself. It is like a man saying to himself resolutely, “What am I? What am I doing with myself? Where am I drifting?” and making an answer, hesitating at first, crude at first, and presently clear and lucid.
The Socialist movement is from this point of view, no less than the development of the collective self-consciousness of humanity. Necessarily, therefore, it must be international as well as outspoken, making no truce with prejudices against race and colour. These national and racial collective consciousnesses of to-day are things as vague, as fluctuating as mists or clouds, they melt, dissolve into one another, they coalesce, they split. No clear isolated national mind can ever maintain itself under modern conditions; even the mind of Japan now comes into the common melting-pot of thought. We Socialists take up to-day the assertion the early Christians were the first to make, that mankind is of one household and one substance; the Samaritan who stoops to the wounded stranger by the wayside our brother rather than that Levite….
In a very different sense indeed the Socialist propaganda must be the germ of the collective self-consciousness of mankind in the coming time. If the purpose of Socialism is to prevail, its scattered writings, its dispersed, indistinct and confused utterances must increase in height and breadth and range, increase in power and service, gather to themselves every means of expression, grow into an ordered system of thought, art, literature and will. The Socialist Propaganda of to-day must beget the whole Public Opinion of to-morrow or fail, the Socialists must play the part of a little leaven to leaven the whole world. If they do not leaven it then they are altogether defeated….