but it is hardly possible or desirable to maintain this attitude continuously. Universal sympathy is impracticable; what we need is better control and selection, avoiding both the narrowness of our class and the dissipation of promiscuous impressions. It is well for a man to open out and take in as much of life as he can organize into a consistent whole, but to go beyond that is not desirable. In a time of insistent suggestion, like the present, it is fully as important to many of us to know when and how to restrict the impulses of sympathy as it is to avoid narrowness. And this is in no way inconsistent, I think, with that modern democracy of sentiment—also connected with the enlargement of communication—which deprecates the limitation of sympathy by wealth or position. Sympathy must be selective, but the less it is controlled by conventional and external circumstances, such as wealth, and the more it penetrates to the essentials, of character, the better. It is this liberation from convention, locality, and chance, I think, that the spirit of the time calls for.
Again, the life of this age is more diversified than life ever was before, and this appears in the mind of the person who shares it as a greater variety of interests and affiliations. A man may be regarded as the point of intersection of an indefinite number of circles representing social groups, having as many arcs passing through him as there are groups. This diversity is connected with the growth of communication, and is another phase of the general enlargement and variegation of life. Because of the greater variety of imaginative contacts it is impossible for a normally open-minded individual not to lead a broader life, in some respects at least, than he would have led in the past. Why is it, for instance, that such ideas as brotherhood and the sentiment of equal right are now so generally extended to all classes of men? Primarily, I think, because all classes have become imaginable, by acquiring power and means of expression. He whom I imagine without antipathy becomes my brother. If we feel that we must give aid to another, it is because that other lives and strives in our imaginations, and so is a part of ourselves. The shallow separation of self and other in common speech obscures the extreme simplicity and naturalness of such feelings. If I come to imagine a person suffering wrong it is not “altruism” that makes me wish to right that wrong, but simple human impulse. He is my life, as really and immediately as anything else. His symbol arouses a sentiment which is no more his than mine.
Thus we lead a wider life; and yet it is also true that there is demanded of us a more distinct specialization than has been required in the past. The complexity of society takes the form of organization, that is of a growing unity and breadth sustained by the co-operation of differentiated parts, and the man of the age must reflect both the unity and the differentiation; he must be more distinctly a specialist and at the same time more a man of the world.
It seems to many a puzzling question whether, on the whole, the breadth or the specialization is more potent in the action of modern life upon the individual; and by insisting on one aspect or the other it is easy to frame an argument to show either that personal life is becoming richer, or that man is getting to be a mere cog in a machine.[[30]] I think, however, that these two tendencies are not really opposite but complementary; that it is not a case of breadth versus specialization, but, in the long run at least, of breadth plus specialization to produce a richer and more various humanity. There are many evils connected with the sudden growth in our day of new social structures, and the subjection of a part of the people to a narrow and deadening routine is one of them, but I think that a healthy specialization has no tendency to bring this about. On the contrary, it is part of a liberating development. The narrow specialist is a bad specialist; and we shall learn that it is a mistake to produce him.
In an organized life isolation cannot succeed, and a right specialization does not isolate. There is no such separation between special and general knowledge or efficiency as is sometimes supposed. In what does the larger knowledge of particulars consist, if not in perceiving their relation to wholes? Has a student less general knowledge because he is familiar with a specialty, or is it not rather true that in so far as he knows one thing well it is a window through which he sees things in general?
There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point. If one takes his stand in a field of corn when the young plants have begun to sprout, all the plants in the field will appear to be arranged in a system of rows radiating from his feet; and no matter where he stands the system will appear to centre at that point. It is so with any standpoint in the field of thought and intercourse; to possess it is to have a point of vantage from which the whole may, in a particular manner, be apprehended. It is surely a matter of common observation that a man who knows no one thing intimately has no views worth hearing on things in general. The farmer philosophizes in terms of crops, soils, markets, and implements, the mechanic generalizes his experience of wood and iron, the seaman reaches similar conclusions by his own special road; and if the scholar keeps pace with these it must be by an equally virile productivity. It is a common opinion that breadth of culture is a thing by itself, to be imparted by a particular sort of studies, as, for instance, the classics, modern languages, and so on. And there is a certain practical truth in this, owing, I think, to the fact that certain studies are taught in a broad or cultural way, while others are not. But the right theory of the matter is that speciality and culture are simply aspects of the same healthy mental growth, and that any study is cultural when taught in the best way. And so the humblest careers in life may involve culture and breadth of view, if the incumbent is trained, as he should be, to feel their larger relations.
A certain sort of writers often assume that it is the tendency of our modern specialized production to stunt the mind of the workman by a meaningless routine; but fair opportunities of observation and some practical acquaintance with machinery and the men who use it lead me to think that this is not the general fact. On the contrary, it is precisely the broad or cultural traits of general intelligence, self-reliance, and adaptability that make a man at home and efficient in the midst of modern machinery, and it is because the American workman has these traits in a comparatively high degree that he surpasses others in the most highly specialized production. One who goes into our shops will find that the intelligent and adaptive workman is almost always preferred and gets higher wages; and if there are large numbers employed upon deadening routine it is partly because there is unfortunately a part of our population whose education makes them unfit for anything else. The type of mechanic which a complex industrial system requires, and which it is even now, on the whole, evolving, is one that combines an intimate knowledge of particular tools and processes with an intelligent apprehension of the system in which he works. If he lacks the latter he requires constant oversight and so becomes a nuisance. Anyone acquainted with such matters knows that “gumption” in workmen is fully as important and much harder to find than mere manual skill; and that those who possess it are usually given superior positions. During the late war with Spain it became obvious that the complicated machinery of a modern warship is ineffectual without intelligent, self-reliant, and determined “men behind the guns” to work it; and, of course, the same holds true of other kinds of machinery. And if we pass from tools to personal relations we shall find that the specialized production so much deprecated is only one phase of a wider general life, a life of comparative freedom, intelligence, education, and opportunity, whose general effect is to enlarge the individual. No doubt there are cases in which intelligence seems to have passed out of the man into the machine, leaving the former a mere “tender”; but I think these are not representative of the change as a whole.
The idea of a necessary antagonism between specialization and breadth seems to me an illusion of the same class as that which opposes the individual to the social order. First one aspect and then another is looked at in artificial isolation, and it is not perceived that we are beholding but one thing, after all.
Not only does the sympathetic life of a man reflect and imply the state of society, but we may also discern in it some inkling of those processes, or principles of change, that we see at large in the general movement of mankind. This is a matter rather beyond the scope of this book; but a few illustrations will show, in a general way, what I mean.
The act of sympathy follows the general law that nature works onward by mixing like and unlike, continuity and change; and so illustrates the same principle that we see in the mingling of heredity with variation, specific resemblance with a differentiation of sexes and of individuals, tradition with discussion, inherited social position with competition, and so on. The likeness in the communicating persons is necessary for comprehension, the difference for interest. We cannot feel strongly toward the totally unlike because it is unimaginable, unrealizable; nor yet toward the wholly like because it is stale—identity must always be dull company. The power of other natures over us lies in a stimulating difference which causes excitement and opens communication, in ideas similar to our own but not identical, in states of mind attainable but not actual. If one has energy he soon wearies of any habitual round of activities and feelings, and his organism, competent to a larger life, suffers pains of excess and want at the same time. The key to the situation is another person who can start a new circle of activities and give the faculties concerned with the old a chance to rest. As Emerson has remarked, we come into society to be played upon. “Friendship,” he says again, “requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness, that piques each with the presence of power and of consent in the other party.... Let him not cease an instant to be himself. The only joy I have in his being mine is that the not mine is mine.... There must be very two before there can be very one.”[[31]] So Goethe, speaking of Spinoza’s attraction for him, remarks that the closest unions rest on contrast;[[32]] and it is well known that such a contrast was the basis of his union with Schiller, “whose character and life,” he says, “were in complete contrast to my own.”[[33]] Of course, some sorts of sympathy are especially active in their tendency, like the sympathy of vigorous boys with soldiers and sea-captains; while others are comparatively quiet, like those of old people renewing common memories. It is vivid and elastic where the tendency to growth is strong, reaching out toward the new, the onward, the mysterious; while old persons, the under-vitalized and the relaxed or wearied prefer a mild sociability, a comfortable companionship in habit; but even with the latter there must always be a stimulus given, something new suggested or something forgotten recalled, not merely a resemblance of thought but a “resembling difference.”