Finally, there is the social faculty view. This expression might be used to indicate those conceptions which regard the social as including only a part, often a rather definite part, of the individual. Human nature is thus divided into individualistic or non-social tendencies or faculties, and those that are social. Thus, certain emotions, as love, are social; others, as fear or anger, are unsocial or individualistic. Some writers have even treated the intelligence as an individualistic faculty, and have found sociality only in some sorts of emotion or sentiment.
This idea of instincts or faculties that are peculiarly social is well enough if we use this word in the sense of pertaining to conversation or immediate fellow-feeling. Affection is certainly more social in this sense than fear. But if it is meant that these instincts or faculties are in themselves morally higher than others, or that they alone pertain to the collective life, the view is, I think, very questionable. At any rate the opinion I hold, and expect to explain more fully in the further course of this book, is that man’s psychical outfit is not divisible into the social and the non-social; but that he is all social in a large sense, is all a part of the common human life, and that his social or moral progress consists less in the aggrandizement of particular faculties or instincts and the suppression of others, than in the discipline of all with reference to a progressive organization of life which we know in thought as conscience.
Some instincts or tendencies may grow in relative importance, may have an increasing function, while the opposite may be true of others. Such relative growth and diminution of parts seems to be a general feature of evolution, and there is no reason why it should be absent from our mental development. But here as well as elsewhere most parts, if not all, are or have been functional with reference to a life collective as well as distributive; there is no sharp separation of faculties, and progress takes place rather by gradual adaptation of old organs to new functions than by disuse and decay.
CHAPTER II
SUGGESTION AND CHOICE
The Meaning of these Terms and their Relation to each Other—Individual and Social Aspects of Will or Choice—Suggestion and Choice in Children—The Scope of Suggestion commonly Underestimated—Practical Limitations upon Deliberate Choice—Illustrations of the Action of the Milieu—The Greater or Less Activity of Choice Reflects the State of Society—Suggestibility.
The antithesis between suggestion and choice is another of those familiar ideas which are not always so clear as they should be.
The word suggestion is used here to denote an influence that works in a comparatively mechanical or reflex way, without calling out that higher selective activity of the mind implied in choice or will. Thus the hypnotic subject who performs apparently meaningless actions at the word of the operator is said to be controlled by suggestion; so also is one who catches up tricks of speech and action from other people without meaning to. From such instances the idea is extended to embrace any thought or action which is mentally simple and seems not to involve choice. The behavior of people under strong emotion is suggestive; crowds are suggestible; habit is a kind of suggestion, and so on.
I prefer this word to imitation, which some use in this or a similar sense, because the latter, as ordinarily understood, seems to cover too little in some directions and too much in others. In common use it means an action that results in visible or audible resemblance. Now although our simple reactions to the influence of others are largely of this sort, they are by no means altogether so; the actions of a child during the first six months of life, for instance, are very little imitative in this sense; on the other hand, the imitation that produces a visible resemblance may be a voluntary process of the most complex sort imaginable, like the skilful painting of a portrait. However, it makes little difference what words we use if we have sound meanings back of them, and I am far from intending to find fault with writers, like Professor Baldwin and M. Tarde, who adopt the word and give it a wide and unusual application. For my purpose, however, it does not seem expedient to depart so far from ordinary usage.
The distinction between suggestion and choice is not, I think, a sharp opposition between separable or radically different things, but rather a way of indicating the lower and higher stages of a series. What we call choice or will appears to be an ill-defined area of more strenuous mental activity within a much wider field of activity similar in kind but less intense. It is not sharply divisible from the mass of involuntary thought. The truth is that the facts of the mind, of society, indeed of any living whole, seldom admit of sharp division, but show gradual transitions from one thing to another: there are no fences in these regions. We speak of suggestion as mechanical; but it seems probable that all psychical life is selective, or, in some sense, choosing, and that the rudiments of consciousness and will may be discerned or inferred in the simplest reaction of the lowest living creature. In our own minds the comparatively simple ideas which are called suggestions are by no means single and primary, but each one is itself a living, shifting, multifarious bit of life, a portion of the fluid “stream of thought” formed by some sort of selection and synthesis out of simpler elements. On the other hand, our most elaborate and volitional thought and action is suggested in the sense that it consists not in creation out of nothing, but in a creative synthesis or reorganization of old material.
The distinction, then, is one of degree rather than of kind; and choice, as contrasted with suggestion, is, in its individual aspect, a comparatively elaborate process of mental organization or synthesis, of which we are reflectively aware, and which is rendered necessary by complexity in the elements of our thought. In its social aspect—for all, or nearly all, our choices relate in one way or another to the social environment—it is an organization of comparatively complex social relations. Precisely as the conditions about us and the ideas suggested by those conditions become intricate, are we forced to think, to choose, to define the useful and the right, and, in general, to work out the higher intellectual life. When life is simple, thought and action are comparatively mechanical or suggestive; the higher consciousness is not aroused, the reflective will has little or nothing to do; the captain stays below and the inferior officers work the ship. But when life is diverse, thought is so likewise, and the mind must achieve the higher synthesis, or suffer that sense of division which is its peculiar pain. In short, the question of suggestion and choice is only another view of the question of uniformity and complexity in social relations.