Much of what is unfree and unhuman in our modern life comes from mere inadequacy of mental and moral energy to meet the accumulating demands upon it. In many quarters attention and effort must be lacking, and where this is the case social relations fall to a low plane—just as a teacher who has too much to do necessarily adopts a mechanical style of instruction. So what we call “red tape” prevails in great clerical offices because much business is done by persons of small ability, who can work only under rule. And great bureaucratic systems, like the Russian Empire, are of much the same nature.
In general the wrongs of the social system come much more from inadequacy than from ill intention. It is indeed not to be expected that all relations should be fully rational and sympathetic; we have to be content with infusing reason and sympathy into what is most vital.
Society, then, as a moral organism, is a progressive creation, tentatively wrought out through experiment, struggle, and survival. Not only individuals but ideas, institutions, nations, and races do their work upon it and perish. Its ideals, though simple in spirit, are achieved through endless elaboration of means.
It will be my further endeavor to throw some light upon this striving whole by considering certain phases of its organization, such as Communication, Public Opinion, Sentiment, Classes, and Institutions; always trying to see the whole in the part, the part in the whole, and human nature in both.
PART II
COMMUNICATION
CHAPTER VI
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF COMMUNICATION
Meaning of Communication—Its Relation to Human Nature—To Society at Large.
By Communication is here meant the mechanism through which human relations exist and develop—all the symbols of the mind, together with the means of conveying them through space and preserving them in time. It includes the expression of the face, attitude and gesture, the tones of the voice, words, writing, printing, railways, telegraphs, telephones, and whatever else may be the latest achievement in the conquest of space and time. All these taken together, in the intricacy of their actual combination, make up an organic whole corresponding to the organic whole of human thought; and everything in the way of mental growth has an external existence therein. The more closely we consider this mechanism the more intimate will appear its relation to the inner life of mankind, and nothing will more help us to understand the latter than such consideration.
There is no sharp line between the means of communication and the rest of the external world. In a sense all objects and actions are symbols of the mind, and nearly anything may be used as a sign—as I may signify the moon or a squirrel to a child by merely pointing at it, or by imitating with the voice the chatter of the one or drawing an outline of the other. But there is also, almost from the first, a conventional development of communication, springing out of spontaneous signs but soon losing evident connection with them, a system of standard symbols existing for the mere purpose of conveying thought; and it is this we have chiefly to consider.
Without communication the mind does not develop a true human nature, but remains in an abnormal and nondescript state neither human nor properly brutal. This is movingly illustrated by the case of Helen Keller, who, as all the world knows, was cut off at eighteen months from the cheerful ways of men by the loss of sight and hearing; and did not renew the connection until she was nearly seven years old. Although her mind was not wholly isolated during this period, since she retained the use of a considerable number of signs learned during infancy, yet her impulses were crude and uncontrolled, and her thought so unconnected that she afterward remembered almost nothing that occurred before the awakening which took place toward the close of her seventh year.