But the current of events is ever bringing to pass unforeseen changes, and if these are great and sudden they may again throw us into a disorderly struggle, just as a panic in a theatre may convert an assemblage of polite and considerate people into a ruthless mob. Something of this kind has taken place in connection with the industrial revolution, bringing on a confusion and demoralization from which we have only partly emerged. Another case is where a conflict, for whose orderly conduct the organization does not provide, having long developed beneath the surface in the shape of antagonistic ideals and institutions, breaks out disastrously at last, as did the Civil War in the United States, or the great war in Europe. We can provide against this only in the measure that we foresee and control the process in which we live. If we can do this we may look for an era of deliberate and assured progress, in which conflict is confined and utilized like fire under the boiler.
CHAPTER V
PARTICULARISM VERSUS THE ORGANIC VIEW
INTELLECTUAL PARTICULARISM—ITS FALLACY—ECONOMIC DETERMINISM—THE ORGANIC VIEW AS AFFECTING METHODS OF STUDY—WHY PARTICULARISM IS COMMON
We meet in social discussion a way of thinking opposed to the conception of organic process as I have tried to expound it, which I will call intellectual particularism.[[7]] It consists in holding some one phase of the process to be the source of all the others, so that they may be treated as subsidiary to it.
A form of particularism that until recently was quite general is one that regards the personal wills of individual men, supplemented, perhaps, by the similar will of a personal God, as the originative factor in life from which all else comes. Everything took place, it was assumed, because some one willed it so, and for the will there was no explanation or antecedent history: it was the beginning, the creative act. When this view prevailed there could be no science of human affairs, because there was no notion of system or continuity in them; life was kept going by a series of arbitrary impulses. As opposed to this we have the organic idea that will is as much effect as cause, that it always has a history, and is no more than one phase of a great whole.
In contrast to particularistic views of this sort we have others which find the originative impulse in external conditions of life, such as climate, soil, flora, and fauna; and regard intellectual and social activities merely as the result of the physiological needs of men seeking gratification under these conditions.
A doctrine of the latter character having wide acceptance at the present time is “economic determinism,” which looks upon the production of wealth and the competition for it as the process of which everything else is the result. The teaching of Marxian socialism upon this point is well known, and some economists who are not socialists nevertheless hold that all important social questions grow out of the economic struggle, and that all social institutions, including those of education, art, and religion, should be judged according as they contribute to success in this struggle. This is, indeed, a view natural to economists, who are accustomed to look at life from this window, though most of them have enough larger philosophy to avoid any extreme form of it.[[8]]
The fallacy of all such ideas lies in supposing that life is built up from some one point, instead of being an organic whole which is developing as a whole now and, so far as we know, always has done so in the past. Nothing is fixed or independent, everything is plastic and takes influence as well as gives it. No factor of life can exist for men except as it is merged in the organic system and becomes an effect as much as a cause of the total development. If you insist that there is a centre from which the influence comes, all flowing in one direction, you fly in the face of fact. What observation shows is a universal interaction, in which no factor appears antecedent to the rest.
Any particularistic explanation of things, I should say, must be based on the idea that most institutions, most phases of life, are passive, receive force but do not impart it, are mere constructions and not transitive processes. But where will you find such passive institutions or phases? Are not all alive, all factors in the course of history as we know it? It seems to me that if you think concretely, in terms of experience, such an explanation cannot be definitely conceived.
I hold that the organic view is not a merely abstract theory about the nature of life and of society, but is concrete and verifiable, giving a more adequate general description than other theories of what we actually see, and appealing to fact as the test of its value. It does not attempt to say how things began, but claims that their actual working, in the present and in the historical past, corresponds to the organic conception.