[2] The worth assigned in this chapter to the contradictions of experience involves a standpoint which apparently is at variance with that of Mr. F.H. Bradley, whose book, Appearance and Reality, has occupied such an important place in the philosophical study and controversy of the last ten years. Of course, here is not the place for final criticism of Mr. Bradley, since the present examination of doubt is no such scrutiny of experience as his; it is far short of what would make a complete philosophical argument. Nevertheless, a word or two expressing the nature of the difference between his view and the view advocated here can hardly be impertinent. Thus, if I read him rightly, Mr. Bradley has argued from the paradoxes of experience to the complete, hopeless phenomenality of experience, while in this study of doubt the argument has been from the paradoxes of experience to a thoroughly realistic experience. Again, Mr. Bradley's Absolute is able to include the phenomenal, the relative and contradictory, only because this is so unsubstantial as to offer no resistance, while here there has not even been any question of inclusion. All experience, our position has been, is informed with reality; its very contradictions hold an otherwise phenomenal, relative, changing experience close down to a real world; and this position, I repeat, is at variance with what Mr. Bradley has seemed to say. See, however, a short article, "Relativity and Reality," in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, Vol. I, No. 24, November, 1904.
VII.
THE PERSONAL AND THE SOCIAL, THE VITAL AND THE FORMAL IN EXPERIENCE.
Contrasts such as those in the title of the present chapter, the personal and the social, the vital and the formal, or instrumental, are always dangerous to clear thinking, and yet in spite of the danger no thinking can avoid them. They can be only relatively true; the terms in which they are couched cannot fail, sooner or later, from one standpoint or another, to make an exchange of the very things to which they apply, since opposition, as must be remembered, is always a most effective mixer, and therefore they can only punctuate the naturally chiaroscuro character that belongs to all articulate thinking. Nevertheless, used with self-control, they are distinctly serviceable.
In our recent dismission of the value of the essential defects of experience, and particularly when we came to associate social character with the habit of contradiction, a contrast of the personal and the social was very plainly implied, and some special attention to this contrast, I feel sure, will help us to comprehend more fully what was said at the time, and will be of great advantage also to our general purpose. It was said that society was nothing alien, or additional, to the nature of the individual, that a basis for society lay in the very nature of experience, that so long as man was divided against himself and the labour of life and reality was necessarily a divided labour, the case both for society and for personal interest in society was clear and conclusive; but this was not fully to define the parts that are played by the individual person and the social group in the development and maintenance of human life. Some, for example, would fear more for the safety of the individual or the person than for that of society; and just in recognition of their fear, we honest doubters, who are now also at least potential believers, must look to our defences.
Long ago Plato drew an analogy of the soul or self, of the human individual, to society, and so, too, Aristotle, though not to society, but much more broadly to all nature, and the one analogy or the other has had a good deal of fascination, not to say intellectual inspiration, for thinking men ever since. Yet, so far as I am aware, at least one of the implications of the idea has never been fully stated or appraised, and this is much to be wondered at, since there is involved a strong case for both the personal and the social in the maintenance of experience.[1]
Plato found reason, will, and sensuous nature in the individual and analogously a thinking or law-making class, an official or military class, and an industrial or appetitive class in society; and Aristotle, in very much the same way, found the parts of the individual soul analogous to the vegetable, animal, and rational kingdoms of nature, and either of these analogies is simple enough and reasonable enough to be formally understood, if not at once wholly appreciated, with its mere statement. Still, in order to be sure of appreciation, in order especially to get the reflected light on the relation between individual and society, we must look to the facts and conditions which are presented very closely.
To begin with, such an analogy, dealing as it does with the relation of a part to the whole, has and should have, for a reason not hard to find, the freedom of the city of logic. Other than logical approval of it might be cited. Biology and sociology and psychology might be called in to give testimony. And out of the past, the more recent past at least as known to the historian of philosophy, Leibnitz with his lex analogiæ, or for that matter with the general import of his monadology, might be appealed to. But without tarrying for assistance from these quarters, highly respectable though they are, I make a simple, yet perhaps timely and—with apologies for so much emotion—soul-satisfying reference to the logic in the case, for after all biology and sociology and psychology are always under the restraints of logic, as well as alliterated with it; nor does the evidence of logic depend on mere technical acquaintance with given sets of facts. Thus, in these enlightened days, to say nothing of Plato's time or Aristotle's, how can the true part of anything ever dare not to have an analogy, even a "part-for-part" or "one-to-one" correspondence to the whole in which it is comprised? And—this being, as in due time will appear, quite as important—how can a whole, be it society or nature or anything else, ever have parts without having also, actually or potentially, parts within its parts? In fact, given any divided whole, and the division, however far it may be carried, will always involve at least these three typical factors: (1) The individual as the part still undivided, though at the same time necessarily inwardly alive with the self-same differential operation to which it has owed its origin; (2) the group-part or class, which for the convenience of the adjective form may be known also as the faction, and which was so important to Plato in his analogy of the individual to a class-divided society; and (3) the all-inclusive whole. And among these factors in all possible ways—that is, even between individual and individual, or individual and group or group and group, as well as between either individual or group and whole—an analogy in terms of all the various elements of the original differential operation will persist. Such, almost truistically, though also perhaps somewhat subtly for ordinary purposes, is the logical condition of division or differentiation. Difference, like its limit opposition, is thus a great mixer, and division can be no mere separation or isolation of parts. The saying comes to my mind from somewhere, that though division may reveal distinct vertebræ, the vertebra always conceal a spinal cord.
Analogy, however, although thus universal, although applicable, as said, in all of the possible ways, must itself share in, must be quite under the spell of, the differentiation; it must have as many various forms as it has expressions. In every expression the relation must indeed be one of analogy, but it can never be of the same order or degree. That of the individual to the group or faction must be qualitatively distinct from all others, say from that of the individual either to another individual or to the all-inclusive whole. Nor can the much used and frequently abused distinction between small and large writings, as when history is taken as a large writing of personal biography or a social institution of some special phase of personal character, adequately represent the differentiation here in mind. Consider how various, internally and externally, are all the terms among which the analogies obtain. Thus, as of direct interest here, factional differences are bound to be sharper or wider, they are inevitably more deeply set and more openly exclusive of each other than individual differences, and in consequence the faction is, not indeed absolutely, but characteristically special or particularistic. Perhaps because of its intermediate position between the individual, which is the whole implicitly and potentially, and the completely inclusive environment, which is the whole actually and definitely or explicitly, it is, so to speak, significantly only one among many, instead of being, as in the case of each of the extremes, many in one. It conspicuously appropriates a particular character, and while not excluding any of the other characters which are incident to its own special production, it includes these on the whole only in a negative way, in the way in which opposition includes what opposes it or action the reaction it always implies or in general any different thing the thing or things from which it is different. The extremes, however, as was said, are each "many in one," though in different ways. The individual, being still only potentially divided and being, as it were, the latest residence of the primary operation, is always in some measure directly and positively active with all the different factors of the operation, and this in spite of the restraints of any particular class-affiliation, and the whole, though macro-cosmic with respect to the microcosmic individual, is at the same time qualitatively distinct, as distinct at least as the explicit from the implicit, the actual from the potential. Whatever a merely formal logic might say, a real logic requires that at most microcosm and macrocosm are only metaphors of each other. Even their difference of size would be quite enough to differentiate them at least as sharply as the difference of size differentiated imperial Rome from her prototype the Greek City-State. Can the whole and the part be one or many or many in one, can they be real or alive or conscious, can they be material, can they be personal, can they be anything whatsoever in qualitatively the same way? Men have often seemed to think so, but without any good reason. The faction, then, the individual and the whole, are qualitatively different expressions of the elements of the operation that has made them; and their relations, always dependent on analogy, must be various accordingly.