The will to doubt

by Alfred H. Lloyd

But now, to leave these questions of logic and to turn directly to the case for both personality and society, no idea can be more immediately useful to us than that of what is often styled the unity of experience. Of course this unity, as it is real, must meet just those tests of reality, or of a real unity, that we have already remarked, but within the limits of a definition the unity of experience is neither more nor less than the totality of human relations. It is the experience-whole comprising all the phases of human nature; in other words, all the actual or possible relations of man to nature in general, or all the manifold states and activities, stages and events, however different, however seemingly contradictory, in human life. A real unity, as we know, being denied local habitation and a name, is necessarily a thoroughly differential unity; and human nature is analyzable in an indefinite number of ways. It is, to illustrate, physical, mental, and spiritual, or more elaborately, it is athletic, industrial, political, intellectual, moral, æsthetic, and religious, and in its social life has developed institutions answering to these different phases of itself. It is, again, lawful and lawless, old and young, conservative and radical, sympathetic and selfish. But whatever the mode of analysis or division or dichotomy, the unity of experience embraces all the elements, aspects, or relations that are discovered. In a word, even in the language of the simple logic indicated above, the unity of experience is only the all-inclusive whole, but here without regard to any distinction between what is actual or explicit and what is potential or implicit, out of which has sprung the differential operation that has made human society and human history, that has given rise to a manifest social life, to the social class or faction and to the individual person.

And the person as the real individual, as the part that is still undivided, and that is therefore in itself quick with the differential operation, is thus the living, integral exponent of the unity of experience. He is, above all, its unformed or untethered vitality. In him every phase or part of what is possible in human nature moves with some power. He is religious, political, industrial; or spiritual, intellectual, and physical; or good and bad, conservative and radical, all in one; and characteristically he is each and all of these without the restraints of such visible forms or rites as now and again may become instrumental to their expression. Hence the familiar idea of the universality, which is identical with the indeterminate character, of any side of human nature; of the political side, for example, or the religious or the physiological, of the lawful or of the lawless. Not any particular political status, nor any particular religion, nor any particular body is universal, but the political or the religious or the physiological is universal—as universal, to repeat, as it is indeterminate. Not any particular lawfulness or lawlessness, but the lawful or the lawless is universal. Personally, just to sum up what has been said, all individuals are all things in one, and this idea, as it is understood, should correct that erroneous treatment of individualism, whether as a movement in the life of society or even as an incident of the scientific method of induction, to which reference was made in the discussion of the rise of science.[2]

But the story of personality cannot be told by itself. Whatever the person may be characteristically, he is never that alone, and before any estimate of all that he is or of all that enters into his life can be attained, attention must be turned to society, the other horn of our present interest, and particularly to the social class or faction. If the person in his peculiar character is general or all-inclusive with reference to the unity of experience, the factional life is special, particular, or partial; it is one-sided and outwardly exclusive. Sociologically as well as logically factional differences are, as has been suggested, wider and sharper than individual or personal differences. Personally all men are free, socially approachable, liberal in thought and act; not so factionally. Judged from its classes society is even a hot-bed of specialism, its classes always tending to become castes, and of hostility, its differences inducing open conflict. An illustration of this we have already seen in the rise of the profession of science.

Whence, to emphasize at once a most important conclusion, the typical relation of the person to the class is not, as so often said or implied, that of the particular to the general; instead it is that of the general to the particular, of the whole to the part, and significantly that of the vital to the instrumental. Yet, to say no more than this would be a serious mistake, for at least in two ways this statement must be modified. Doubtless the required modifications are directly consequent upon the nature and origin of the relation, but nevertheless they need to be carefully observed. Thus, logically and sociologically factional differences are not merely wider and deeper; just because more definitely set, they also imply higher development. Factional life may be special, but through the strength that union gives and the power and efficiency that spring from repetition and imitation, it attains a high degree of skill and insight. Again, factional life, like that of corporations, lacks soul; it tends to become formal and mechanical and in the sense that this indicates it is static. Hence its instrumental character. Between individual and class there is a difference very like that between impulse and habit, or organic life and mere physical process, or function and structure, or say human nature in terms of its life-principle, of its distinctly dynamic character, and in terms of its establishments or institutions. Accordingly the relation of the person to the class is indeed that of the whole to the part, but of the whole in a state that is formally undeveloped to the part more or less highly developed, and of the whole as a living, functional activity, the differential operation of the unity of experience, to the part as an institution or instrument.

From all this it appears that the labour involved in the maintenance and development of human life is divided between the person and the social classes in some such way as follows. The class life stands for analysis and special development and establishment; personal life for synthesis and vitality. The factional life of the class is specialistic, and reaps for human nature all the familiar advantages of specialism; the personal life is general or universal, and saves human nature from the disruption and the stagnation to which specialism and its formal establishment always tend. The factional life is mediative and instrumental; the personal life is initiative and purposive. And while so to define the distinction between person and class, or in general to regard their relation as one of whole to part, even with the qualifications that were promptly added, may involve some unavoidable abstraction, and so some limitation of the view; nevertheless the view is as real and significant at least as the conditions upon which it rests. Even though persons may be differentiated from each other in an indefinite number of ways, no two being personal, materially, in the same way, no two having the same factional restraints, still the relation of whole to part, subject only to the distinctions of development and of dynamic or static character, remains significantly the typical relation of the person to the class. The person may be only a part of the class, as parts are merely counted, but in interest and possibility, in the fullest reach of his vitality, the person is larger than the class. And, if this be the typical relation, then not only is the story of the person seen to be inseparable from that of the class, but also there is clearly a real place in social life at once for the person and for the class. Factional life lacks completeness and vitality, and personality, the living, integral expression of the unity of experience, supplies these defects. True, a conflict of classes or factions may always be counted on, since the unity of the total life, which of course includes the classes, will prevent their ever being indifferent to each other, and this conflict will make for both completeness and vitality, but negatively, indirectly, always as if from outside. Only through the person can vitality and completeness be secured positively and directly and immediately. Personality, on the other hand, lacks definiteness and practical efficiency, and only the special mechanical life of the class can supply these needs. So in the two together we see a most indispensable co-operation.

The person, furthermore, because of his particular class affiliation, with the attainment in the way of skill and insight which this imparts, is always naturally under constraint not merely to overcome the specialism, but also to apply the special training beyond the immediate sphere of its development to all sides of the nature that is within him. Out of the depth and breadth of his personal character, bounded only by the unity of experience, he must ever react against the narrowness and the factional ritual, and taking this ritual—or special professional technique—to be valid mediately rather than immediately, in spirit rather than merely in letter, must ever seek to translate his factional experience, its skill and its insight, to all parts of human life. Only so can he be true both to his special classification and to his personal wholeness.

But an insistent question: Is such translation possible? On the possibility the case for either personality or a class-divided society must finally depend. On the possibility hangs also the worth of this case to the general argument of this book. Logically, there certainly can be but one answer, and that an affirmative one, since analogy, the primal condition of translation, must be universal among the parts of any unity as well as between any part and the whole. No two parts, it is true, can be literal, prosaic reproductions of each other, but metaphors of each other all parts are bound to be, and any part and the whole must also have this relation of the metaphor, so that any acquired, more or less highly developed power of thought or action, however special and however technical, may and must have meaning throughout the whole life of the person or of humanity. Accordingly, with the acquired freedom of any part, the metaphors, relating part to part, may, if not must, flash to the remotest regions of the person's experience-world. The left hand, with its unconsciously developed power, of course usually unexercised, of mirror-writing, affords only a very crude illustration of what this implies, and a very imaginative illustration is in the flashing of the morning light as it reaches height after height of the beholder's outstretched world.

The conclusions of logic in this matter have sometimes been questioned, if not defied. Quite properly, it may be, many people, and particularly many among scientists, have been in the habit of distrusting the leading of mere logic in the solution of their problems. But in this particular matter I think that no scientist has ever succeeded in making out a negative case. A few have tried to do so, have thought themselves for a time successful, and then in the end, though not without some reservation, have gone over to the other side. Probably their undertaking has been inspired by the extravagant views sometimes entertained, as when money-getting is supposed to educate people to an appreciation of music and art, or a ready memory for one class of things to imply the same facility in acquiring a memory of another class of things, or skill in the use of tools to make a good dentist, or physical self-control or intellectual sincerity to ensure moral truthfulness. Whereas, if it could be remembered that no special training could ever be literally applicable beyond the particular sphere of its attainment, the relation of part and part of human nature being only analogous and metaphorical, and that in any scientifically observed case special training, when artificially acquired, or when a result only of a suggested and merely imitated routine, can hardly count as conclusive evidence, the problem would lose much of its interest, and science would be ready even to accept the logical solution. Logically, then, the translation is possible, and scientifically there is no real evidence against its possibility.

As to the translation being positively natural or necessary, as well as possible, the suggestion may not be impertinent that whatever is truly possible must be also real; that is to say, certain of realization or rather somehow and somewhere, in some manner and in some degree already in expression. Even the possible can never have been made out of, or sprung up out of, nothing. Moreover, the translation here spoken of, wherein one developed side of life flashes its message, more spiritual than literal, to another side or the other side of life, plainly can require nothing unnatural. It exacts only that all the different elements of our nature and experience, whether as personally or as factionally manifested, shall be forever true to their origin. The apparent obstacles to translation certainly cannot be obstacles on the ground of the analogies of the various parts being only metaphorical instead of literal, for already in the original differentiation that has made person and faction, that has separated the parts, these have been overcome. The very nature of the person is their overcoming. The unity of experience must persist assertive and inviolable, whatever the divisions of experience. The distinct vertebræ must always contain a spinal cord that has a common origin with them.

And it remains to be said that since the person is thus at once the living integral exponent of the unity of experience and the member of some class or faction, translation is his most characteristic activity. In this translation, too, we see him a leader, or a party to real leadership, by nature. In it lies his true genius. Indeed, this translation is just that which makes the great leader or the great genius, for through it the person is ever showing himself superior to his class and training, and to the formal institutions that have brought him up. Factional life, as we know, develops through imitation and repetition, but personality through invention under guidance of the flashing analogies. Invention, too, the application of special development beyond the sphere of its origin, is only the psychological term for what sociologically is leadership. In the theory and in the practice of art, morals, religion, politics, science, and all the other special sides of experience, the factional and the personal are ever to be distinguished in this way—the one imitative, the other inventive. Witness the familiar antitheses between the typical and the vital in art-expression, the formally ideal and the really pleasant in morality, the legal and the sovereign in politics, the orthodox and the spiritually alive in religion, technical skill and originality in science, and so on. These antitheses are all very important to the understanding of human experience, particularly of its history, but they are frequently seriously misapplied. More than anything else they show the personal ever asserting its superiority over the factional; the living whole, over the developed, established part; and always in order that the whole, overcoming the exclusiveness of the part, may translate and appropriate its acquirements.