Above all, the organic view of mind calls for social knowledge as the basis of morality. We live in a system, and to achieve right ends, or any rational ends whatever, we must learn to understand that system. The public mind must emerge somewhat from its subconscious condition and know and guide its own processes.
Both consciously and unconsciously the larger mind is continually building itself up into wholes—fashions, traditions, institutions, tendencies, and the like—which spread and diversify like the branches of a tree, and so generate an ever higher and more various structure of differentiated thought and symbols. The immediate motor and guide of this growth is interest, and wherever that points social structure comes into being, as a picture grows where the artist moves his pencil. Visible society is, indeed, literally, a work of art, slow and mostly subconscious in its production—as great art often is—full of grotesque and wayward traits, but yet of inexhaustible beauty and fascination. It is this we find in the history of old civilizations, getting from it the completed work of the artist without that strain and confusion of production which defaces the present. We get it, especially, not from the history of the theorist or the statistician, but from the actual, naïve, human record to be found in memoirs, in popular literature, in architecture, painting, sculpture, and music, in the industrial arts, in every unforced product of the mind.
Social organization is nothing less than this variegation of life, taken in the widest sense possible. It should not be conceived as the product merely of definite and utilitarian purpose, but as the total expression of conscious and subconscious tendency, the slow crystallization in many forms and colors of the life of the human spirit.
Any fairly distinct and durable detail of this structure may be called a social type; this being a convenient term to use when we wish to break up the whole into parts, for analysis or description. Thus there are types of personality, of political structure, of religion, of classes, of the family, of art, of language; also of processes, like communication, coöperation, and competition; and so on. The whole is so various that from every new point of view new forms are revealed. Social types are analogous to the genera, species, and varieties of the animal world, in being parts of one living whole and yet having a relative continuity and distinctness which is susceptible of detailed study. Like biological types, also, they exist in related systems and orders, are subject to variation, compete with one another, flourish and decay, may be flexible or rigid, and may or may not form prolific crosses with one another.
Without forgetting to see life as individuals, we must learn to see it also as types, processes, organization, the latter being just as real as the former. And especially, in order to see the matter truly, should we be able to interpret individuals by wholes, and vice versa.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] See his essay on Coleridge.
[4] Pollock’s Spinoza, 2d ed., 195.
[5] Amply expounded, with due stress on the moral value of letting-go, by William James, in his Varieties of Religious Experience: “This abandonment of self-responsibility seems to be the fundamental act in specifically religious, as distinguished from moral practice. It antedates theologies and is independent of philosophies ... it is capable of entering into closest marriage with every speculative creed.” Page 289.