Let any one fix his mind upon some one factor or group of factors which may appear at first to be original, and see if, upon reflection, it does not prove to be an outgrowth of the organic whole of history. Thus many start their explanation of modern life with the industrial revolution in England. But what made the industrial revolution? Was it brought into the world by an act of special creation, or was it a natural sequence of the preceding political, social, intellectual, and industrial development? Evidently the latter: it is a historical fact, like another, to be explained as the outcome of a total process, just as much an effect of the mental and social conditions of the past as it came to be a cause of those of the future. I think this will always prove to be the case when we inquire into the antecedents of any factor in life. There is no beginning; we know nothing about beginnings; there is always continuity with the past, and not with any one element only of the past, but with the whole interacting organism of man.
If universal interaction is a fact, it follows that social life is a whole which can be understood only by studying its total working, not by fixing attention upon one activity and attempting to infer the rest. The latter method implies an idea similar to that of special creation, an idea that there is a starting-place, a break of continuity, a cause that is not also an effect.
Such visible and tangible things as climate, fuel, soils, fruits, grains, wild or domestic animals, and the like have for many a more substantial appearance than ideas or institutions, and they are disposed to lean upon these, or upon some human activity immediately connected with them, as a solid support for their philosophy of life. But after all such things exist for us only as they have interacted with our traditional organism of life and become a part of it. Climate, as it actually touches us, may be said to be a social institution, of which clothes, shelter, artificial heat, and irrigation are obvious aspects. And so with our economic “environment.” What are deposits of iron and coal, or fertility of soil, or navigable waters, or plants and animals capable of domestication, except in conjunction with the traditional arts and customs through which these are utilized? To a people with one inheritance of ideas a coal-field means nothing at all, to a people with another it means a special development of industry. Such conditions owe their importance, like anything else, to the way they work in with the process already going on.
Another reason for the popularity of material or economic determinism is the industrial character of our time and of many of our more urgent problems, which has caused our minds to be preoccupied with this class of ideas. A society like ours produces such theories just as a militarist society produces theories that make war the dominating process.
It is easy to show that the “mores of maintenance,” the way a people gets its living, exercise an immense influence upon all their ideas and institutions.[[9]] But what are the “mores of maintenance”? Surely not something external to their history and imposed upon them by their material surroundings, as seems often to be assumed in this connection, but simply their whole mental and social organism, functioning for self-support through its interaction with these surroundings. They are as much the effect as they can possibly be the cause of psychical phenomena, and to argue economic determinism from their importance begs the whole question. Material factors are essential in the organic whole of life, but certainly no more so than the spiritual factors, the ideas, and institutions of the group.
Professor W. G. Sumner, probably by way of protest against a merely ideal view of history, said: “We have not made America; America has made us.” Evidently we might turn this around, and it would be just as plausible. “We” have made of America something very different from what the American Indians made of it, or from what the Spaniards would probably have made of it if it had fallen to them. “America” (the United States) is the total outcome of all the complex spiritual and material factors—the former chiefly derived from European sources—which have gone into its development.
To treat the human mind as the primary factor in life, gradually unfolding its innate tendencies under the moulding power of conditions, is no less and no more plausible than to begin with the material. Why should originative impulse be ascribed to things rather than to mind? I see no warrant in observed fact for giving preference to either.[[10]]
It is the aim of the organic view to “see life whole,” or at least as largely as our limitations permit. However, it by no means discredits the study of society from particular standpoints, such as the economic, the political, the military, the religious. This is profitable because the whole is so vast that to get any grasp of it we need to approach it now from one point of view, now from another, fixing our attention upon each phase in turn, and then synthetizing it all as best we can.
Moreover, every phenomenon stands in more immediate relation to some parts of the process than to others, making it necessary that these parts should be especially studied in order to understand this phenomenon. Hence it may be quite legitimate, with reference to a given problem, to regard certain factors as of peculiar importance. I would not deny that poverty, for example, is to be considered chiefly in connection with the economic system; while I regard the attempt to explain literature, art, or religion mainly from this standpoint as fantastic. But when we are seeking a large view we should endeavor to embrace the whole process. No study of a special chain of causes is more than an incident in that perception of a reciprocating whole which I take to be our great aim.
If we think in this way we shall approach the comprehension of a period of history, or of any social situation, very much as we approach a work of organic art, like a Gothic cathedral. We view the cathedral from many points, and at our leisure, now the front and now the apse, now taking in the whole from a distance, now lingering near at hand over the details, living with it, if we can, for months, until gradually there arises a conception of it which is confined to no one aspect, but is, so far as the limits of our mind permit, the image of the whole in all its unity and richness.