v. But the ideas involved in mere legality, though they bear emphatic testimony to the conscious and artificial aspect of the social whole, have always {40} been regarded with some justice as the type of what is empty and formal. To treat a law as a command with a penalty annexed, or to enunciate the tendency of social progress as being from status to contract, may convey important meanings, but is obviously very far short of the whole truth. And, indeed, generalisations of this kind, though characteristic of a certain class of reflective Jurisprudence, do not at all represent the highest level which has been reached within the science of right itself. But yet, as we pass beyond these everyday working conceptions, we are beginning to leave the central ground of Jurisprudence, and to move towards a point of view which deals more completely with life and culture. The need and occasion for such a point of view may be measured by that revival of national individuality which was referred to in the last chapter as constituting the true ground and occasion for the rebirth of genuine political philosophy in modern times. Montesquieu’s investigation into the “spirit of laws,” and his treatment of a law as something deeper than a command, following upon the similar endeavours of Vico, was in fact a recognition of the fundamental unity of a national civilisation, which, on its political side, even Hobbes and Locke had already attempted to explain by help of the inadequate instruments furnished to them by legal theory. Montesquieu’s and Vico’s conceptions were only the forerunners of the many-sided study of civilisation which characterised the latter part of the eighteenth century, following up the problem which was enunciated in Rousseau’s paradox, that “law itself must be created by the social spirit which it aims at creating.” To recognise the social spirit {41} of a people, as the central unity behind its law and culture and politics, was the principle of the various researches dealing with formative art, poetry, language, religion, and the state, which marked the close of the eighteenth century (compare Wolf’s theory of Homer as the utterance of a racial mind), and laid the foundation of nineteenth century idealism.
The true Greek renaissance, initiated in the age of Winckelmann, forcing modern minds into contact with Hellenic ideas in their original form, and no longer through Latin intermediaries, furnished a type and focus for these researches by bringing before the thoughts of students the brilliant individuality of the ancient city-state, the crude traditions of which had already exercised the most powerful influence on Rousseau, and through him on the Revolution. At the same time the organic sciences were full of activity. The life-work of Goethe marks the parallelism of the two movements. It is plain that the doctrines of Comte were no more than a very one-sided attempt to formulate the significance of the fermentation around him, and that deeply as he felt the unity of the social being, his expression of it ignored half the lesson of the times. Thus the generalities of Jurisprudence are vitalised and completed by the work of the sciences of culture; and the conception of a national mind and character takes its unquestioned place in modern social theory. It may be well at this point also to call attention to the researches which later historians have directed to what may be called “Comparative Politics”; the relations, that is, of communities under government with respect to the {42} mode in which they are governed. [1] For this branch of inquiry once more, though narrow and empty by itself, yet does aid in bringing to light the purposive and conscious character of society, and in correcting the tendency to treat it altogether as a “natural” phenomenon.
[1] Freeman’s Comparative Politics, and Seeley’s Introduction to Political Science.
vi. “And so the whirligig of Time brings about his revenges.” French Sociology to-day is a psychological science, though its founder banished psychology from his sociological method. Nothing is more instructive than to watch the gradual pressure of the various points of view which are emphasised by the various departments of social experience, as they reveal, under criticism, their tendency to complete themselves and one another by suggesting the only category which is adequate to them as a whole. As every serious student of social matters knows by his own experience, it is impossible to touch a physical fact, or a statistical datum, or a legal enactment, in reference to its social bearing, without its at once, so to speak, coming alive in his hands, and attaching itself to an underlying relation of mind as the only unity which will make it intelligible, and correlate it with other experiences, by themselves no less fragmentary. In statistics, for example, you touch a moving creature, as if through the holes in a wall, at this point and the other, and write down where you have touched him. [1] But to see the creature as he is, and combine your information of all kinds in a just and complete idea, you {43} must get him into the open. And that, when the question is of a life, you can only do by reconstructing his mind, for even to see a social unit with your eyes gives you a fragment only, and not a whole. On Fridays, we are told, the passenger traffic returns of French railways, omnibuses, and steamers show a decline. [2] What dumb fact is this? People do not like to travel on Fridays, or prefer to travel upon other days. What is this preference? The only unity that can really afford an explanation, that can correlate this irregular fragment of fact with the whole to which it belongs, is the living mind and will of the society in which the phenomenon occurs. Explanation aims at referring things to a whole; and there is no true whole but mind. Necessarily, therefore, with widening experience and deepening criticism, mind has become the centre of the experiences focussed by sociology.
[1] Cf. Aspects of the Social Problem (Macmillan, 1895), C.S. Loch on “Returns in Social Science,” p. 287.
[2] Tarde, Les Lois de l’Imitation, p. 115.
We may note some significant points in this development, although, indeed, the whole course of modern sociology is one single illustration of what has just been said. Discussions of the problem in what the differentia of society consists, no longer deal with organic or economic conceptions, but with such ideas as the “Consciousness of kind,” [1] the “Mind of a Crowd,” [2] “Imitation” and “Invention,” [3] similarities and differences in the social consciousness, [4] “Social logic” and society considered as a syllogism, [5] and the imitative and {44} inventive person. [6] The work of M. Tarde in particular is typical of the whole movement, and his phrases have largely been adopted whether in agreement or in controversy. For him the one fact coextensive with the social character is “Imitation”—the means by which ideas and practices spread throughout groups and masses of intelligent beings. For the characteristic of knowable phenomena, in his view, is Repetition, and Imitation is the means and vehicle of Repetition in social matters. Here, however, we have accounted only for generalisation, and differentiation needs a separate origin. This will be supplied by the idea of “Invention;” Invention and Imitation, therefore, are the general form of all social process, the matter on the other hand being analysable as Belief and Desire. Every institution is a belief, [7] every activity is a want or desire. In the Logique Sociale these conceptions of the general medium and process of social life are pushed home into the actual formative operation of the social mind and will. Society, we are told, may be compared not indeed to an organism, but rather to a brain; it is a cooperative mind, a syllogism, in which the principles held by one part are modified and applied by another. M. Tarde’s extreme illustrative hypothesis corresponds strangely with one thrown out by Mr. Sidgwick. Mr. Sidgwick [8] has simplified an ethical question by supposing only a single sentient conscious being in the universe; for M. {45} Tarde there is, we might say, no single being at all; the typical social man is a hypnotical creature, a somnambulist acting under suggestions from others, though he does not know it, and is under the illusion that he is himself. [9] Nothing could be of higher interest than to see the necessities of social science thus working themselves out, on slippery and unfamiliar ground, by the sheer force of facts and experience. That a science of man must be a science of mind seems no longer disputable.
[1] Giddings, p. 17.
[2] Le Bon, Psychologie des Foules.
[3] Tarde, Les Lois de l’Imitation.