And this conclusion seems borne out by all the empirically ascertained facts of, e.g., the life of the lower animals, of human infants, and again of adults of abnormally defective intellectual and moral development. Few persons, unless committed to the defence of a theory through thick and thin, would be prepared to call a worm a self, and most of us would probably feel some hesitation about a new-born baby or a congenital idiot. Again, finite societies are clearly components of Reality, yet, as we have seen, it is probably an error to speak of a society as a self, though every true society is clearly an individual with a community and continuity of purpose which enable us rightly to regard it as a unity capable of development, and to appreciate its ethical worth. Hence it is, perhaps, less likely to lead to misunderstandings if we say simply that the constituents of reality are finite individual experiences, than if we say that they are selves. The self, as we have seen, is a psychological category which only imperfectly represents the facts of experience it is employed to correlate.
(b) Again, if we speak of the Absolute as a society of finite individuals, we ought at least to be careful in guarding ourselves against misunderstanding. Such an expression has certainly some manifest advantages. It brings out both the spiritual character of the system of existence and the fact that, though it contains a plurality of finite selves and contains them without discord, it is not properly thought of as a self, but as a community of many selves.
At the same time, such language is open to misconstructions, some of which it may be well to enumerate. We must not, for instance, assume that all the individuals in the Absolute are necessarily in direct social interrelation. For social relation, properly speaking, is only possible between beings who are ἴσοι καὶ ὅμοιοι at least in the sense of having interests of a sufficiently identical kind to permit of intercommunication and concerted cooperation for the realisation of a common interest. And our own experience teaches us that the range of existence with which we ourselves stand in this kind of relation is limited. Even within the bounds of the human race the social relations of each of us with the majority of our fellows are of an indirect kind, and though with the advance of civilisation the range of those relations is constantly being enlarged, it still remains to be seen whether a “cosmopolitan” society is a realisable ideal or not. With the non-human animal world our social relations, in consequence of the greater divergence of subjective interest, are only of a rudimentary kind, and with what appears to us as inanimate nature, as we have already seen, direct social relation seems to be all but absolutely precluded.
Among the non-human animals, again, we certainly find traces of relations of a rudimentarily social kind, but once more only within relatively narrow limits; the different species and groups seem in the main to be indifferent to one another. And we have no means of disproving the possibility that there may be in the universe an indefinite plurality of social groups, of an organisation equal or superior to that of our human communities, but of a type so alien to our own that no direct communication, not even of the elementary kind which would suffice to establish their existence, is possible. We must be prepared to entertain the possibility, then, that the individuals composing the Absolute fall into a number of groups, each consisting of members which have direct social relations of some kind with each other, but not with the members of other groups.
And also, of course, we must remember that there may very well be varieties of degree of structural complexity in the social groups themselves. In some the amount of intelligent recognition on the part of the individuals of their own and their fellows’ common scheme of interests and purposes is probably less articulate, in others, again, it may be more articulate than is the case in those groups of co-operating human beings which form the only societies of which we know anything by direct experience.
On the other hand, we must, if we speak of the Absolute as a society, be careful to avoid the implication, which may readily arise from a false conception of human societies, that the unity of the Absolute is a mere conceptual fiction or “point of view” of our own, from which to regard what is really a mere plurality of separate units. In spite of the now fairly complete abandonment in words of the old atomistic theories, which treated society as if it were a mere collective name for a multitude of really independent “individuals,” it may be doubted whether we always realise what the rejection of this view implies. We still tend too much to treat the selves which compose a society, at least in our Metaphysics, as if they were given to us in direct experience as merely exclusive of one another, rather than as complementary to one another. In other words, of the two typical forms of experience from which the concept of self appears to be derived, the experience of conflict between our subjective interests and our environment, and that of the removal of the discord, we too often pay attention in our Metaphysics to the former to the neglect of the latter. But in actual life it is oftener the latter that is prominent in our relations with our fellow-men. We—the category of co-operation—is at least as fundamental in all human thought and language as I and thou, the categories of mutual exclusion. That you and I are mutually complementary factors in a wider whole of common interests, is at least as early a discovery of mankind as that our private interests and standpoints collide.
If we speak of existence as a society, then we must be careful to remember that the individual unity of a society is just as real a fact of experience as the individual unity of the members which compose it, and that, when we call the Absolute a society rather than a self, we do not do so with any intention of casting doubt upon its complete spiritual unity as an individual experience. With these restrictions, it would, I think, be fair to say that if the Absolute cannot be called a society without qualification, at any rate human society affords the best analogy by which we can attempt to represent its systematic unity in a concrete conceptual form. To put it otherwise, a genuine human society is an individual of a higher type of structure than any one of the selves which compose it, and therefore more adequately represents the structure of the one ultimately complete system of the Absolute.
We see this more particularly in the superior independence of Society as compared with one of its own members. It is true, of course, that no human society could exist apart from an external environment, but it does not appear to be as necessary to the existence of society as to that of a single self, that it should be sensible of the contrast between itself and its rivals. As we have already sufficiently seen, it is in the main from the experience of contrast with other human selves that I come by the sense of my own selfhood. Though the contents of my concept of self are not purely social, it does at least seem clear that I could neither acquire it, nor retain it long, except for the presence of other like selves which form the complement to it. But though history teaches how closely similar is the part played by war and other relations between different societies in developing the sense of a common national heritage and purpose, yet a society, once started on its course of development, does appear to be able to a large extent to flourish without the constant stimulus afforded by rivalry or co-operation with other societies. One man on a desert land, if left long enough to himself, would probably become insane or brutish; there seems no sufficient reason to hold that a single civilised community, devoid of relations with others, could not, if its internal organisation were sufficiently rich, flourish in a purely “natural” environment. On the strength of this higher self-sufficiency, itself a consequence of superior internal wealth and harmony, a true society may reasonably be held to be a finite individual of a higher type than a single human self.
The general result of this discussion, then, seems to be, that neither in the self nor in society—at any rate in the only forms of it we know to exist—do we find the complete harmony of structure and independence of external conditions which are characteristic of ultimate reality. Both the self and society must therefore be pronounced to be finite appearance, but of the two, society exhibits the fuller and higher individuality, and is therefore the more truly real. We found it quite impossible to regard the universe as a single self; but, with certain important qualifications, we said that it might be thought of as a society without very serious error.[[194]] It will, of course, follow from what has been said, that we cannot frame any finally adequate conception of the way in which all the finite individual experiences form the unity of the infinite experiences. That they must form such a perfect unity we have seen in our Second Book; that the unity of a society is, perhaps, the nearest analogy by which we can represent it, has been shown in the present paragraph. That we have no higher categories which can adequately indicate the precise way in which all existence ultimately forms an even more perfect unity, is an inevitable consequence of the fact of our own finitude. We cannot frame the categories, because we, as finite beings, have not the corresponding experience. To this extent, at least, it seems to me that any sound philosophy must end with a modest confession of ignorance.
“There is in God, men say,