PART V
INSTITUTIONS
CHAPTER XXVIII
INSTITUTIONS AND THE INDIVIDUAL
The Nature of Institutions—Hereditary and Social Factors—The Child and the World—Society and Personality—Personality versus the Institution—The Institution as a Basis of Personality—The Moral Aspect—Choice versus Mechanism—Personality the Life of Institutions—Institutions Becoming Freer in Structure.
An institution is simply a definite and established phase of the public mind, not different in its ultimate nature from public opinion, though often seeming, on account of its permanence and the visible customs and symbols in which it is clothed, to have a somewhat distinct and independent existence. Thus the political state and the church, with their venerable associations, their vast and ancient power, their literature, buildings and offices, hardly appear even to a democratic people as the mere products of human invention which, of course, they are.
The great institutions are the outcome of that organization which human thought naturally takes on when it is directed for age after age upon a particular subject, and so gradually crystallizes in definite forms—enduring sentiments, beliefs, customs and symbols. And this is the case when there is some deep and abiding interest to hold the attention of men. Language, government, the church, laws and customs of property and of the family, systems of industry and education, are institutions because they are the working out of permanent needs of human nature.
These various institutions are not separable entities, but rather phases of a common and at least partly homogeneous body of thought, just as are the various tendencies and convictions of an individual: they are the “apperceptive systems” or organized attitudes of the public mind, and it is only by abstraction that we can regard them as things by themselves. We are to remember that the social system is above all a whole, no matter how the convenience of study may lead us to divide it.
In the individual the institution exists as a habit of mind and of action, largely unconscious because largely common to all the group: it is only the differential aspect of ourselves of which we are commonly aware. But it is in men and nowhere else that the institution is to be found. The real existence of the Constitution of the United States, for example, is in the traditional ideas of the people and the activities of judges, legislators and administrators; the written instrument being only a means of communication, an Ark of the Covenant, ensuring the integrity of the tradition.
The individual is always cause as well as effect of the institution: he receives the impress of the state whose traditions have enveloped him from childhood, but at the same time impresses his own character, formed by other forces as well as this, upon the state, which thus in him and others like him undergoes change.
If we think carefully about this matter, however, we shall see that there are several somewhat different questions which might be included in a study of the relation between the individual and institutions; and these we ought to distinguish.
One of them is that of the babe to the world, or of the hereditary factor of life, existing in us at birth, to the factor of communication and influence.