It is in this way, apparently, that all initiation or variation takes place. It is never produced out of nothing; there is always an antecedent system of tendencies, some of which expand and fructify under fresh suggestions. Initiation is nothing other than an especially productive kind of working, one that proves to be the starting-point for a significant development. A man of genius is one in whom, owing to some happy combination of character and situation, old ideas are kindled into new meaning and power. All inventions occur through the mating of traditional knowledge with fecundating conditions. A new type of institution such as our modern democracy, is but the expansion, in a propitious epoch, of impulses that have been awaiting such an epoch for thousands of years.
But let us confess that we have no wisdom to explain these motions in detail or to predict just when and how they will take place. They are deep-rooted, organic, obscure, and can be anticipated only by an imagination that shares their impulse. There is no prospect, in my opinion, of reducing them to computation. The statement, “that grows which works,” is true and illuminating, but reveals more questions than it solves. Perhaps this is the main use of it, that it leads us on to inquire more searchingly what the social process actually is. It has, I think, an advantage over “adaptation,” “selection,” or “survival of the fittest” in that it gives a little more penetrating statement of what immediately takes place, and also in that it is not so likely to let us rest in mechanical or biological conceptions.
CHAPTER II
ORGANIZATION
ADAPTATION IS AN ORGANIZING PROCESS—UNCONSCIOUS ORGANIZATION IN PERSONS—IMPERSONAL ORGANISMS—ORGANIC GROWTH MAY BE OPPOSED TO THE WILL OF THE PERSONS INVOLVED—IN WHAT SENSE SOCIETY IS AN ORGANISM—ORGANISM AND FREEDOM
A process of adaptive “working” such as I have described is a process also of organization, because it tends to bring about a system of co-ordinated activities fitted to the conditions, and that is what organization is. If a theory, for example, is making its way into the minds of men, and at each point where it is questioned or tested arguments and experiments are being devised to support it, then it is in course of organization. It is becoming an intricate whole of related parts which work in the general mind and extend its influence. The theory of evolution has its organs in every department of thought, the doctrine of eugenics, for example, being one form in which it functions.
The same is true of any living whole. Whenever a person enters upon a new course of life his mind begins to organize with reference to it; he develops ways of thinking and acting that are necessary or convenient in order that he may meet the new conditions. In this way each of us grows to fit his job, acquiring habits that are in some way congruous with it. A farmer, a teacher, a factory worker, a banker, is certain to have in some respects an occupational system of thinking. So a group, if it is lasting and important, like a state, or a church, or a political party, develops an organization every part of which has arisen by adaptive growth.
A university, if we look at it from this point of view, appears as a theatre of multiform selective organization. The students, already sifted by preparatory schools and entrance examinations, are subject to further selection for membership in the various academic groups. They must pass certain preliminary courses, or attain a certain standing before they can take advanced courses or be admitted to honor societies. The athletic, dramatic, and debating groups have also selective methods whose function is to maintain their organized activities. And the university as a whole, and especially its various technical departments, acts as an agent of selection for society at large, determining in great part who are fit for the different professions. It is also a centre for the organization of ideas. Intellectual suggestions relating to every branch of knowledge, brought from every part of the world by books and periodicals as well as by the cosmopolitan body of teachers and students, are compared, discussed, augmented, worked over, and thus organized, presumably for the service of mankind.
This organization, of which we are a part, like the process that creates it, is more largely unconscious than we are apt to perceive. We see human activities co-operating ingeniously to achieve a common object, and it is natural to suppose that this co-operation must be the result of a plan: it is the kind of thing that may be done by prevision, and it does not readily occur to us that it can be done in any other way. But of course organization is something far more extended than consciousness, since plants, for example, exhibit it in great intricacy. Indeed one of the main tasks of Darwin was to overcome by a great array of facts the idea, accepted by his contemporaries, that the curious and subtle adaptations of animal and vegetable life must be due to the action of a planning intelligence. He showed that although even more curious and subtle than had been perceived, they might probably be explained by the slow working of unconscious adaptation, without any plan at all. No one deliberately set out to color the small birds like the ground so that the hawk would not see them, but by the production of birds of varying colors, and the survival and propagation of those that had in some degree a protective resemblance, the latter was gradually perfected and established. The same principle of unintentional adaptation is at work in human life, and we need to be reminded of it because the place of the will at the centre of our personal consciousness leads us to exaggerate the sphere of its activity. The social processes, though they result in a structure which seems rational, perhaps, when it is perceived, are for the most part not planned at all. Consciousness is at work in them, but seldom consciousness of anything more than some immediate object, some detail that contributes to the whole without the actor being aware of the fact. Generally speaking, social organisms feel their way without explicit consciousness of where they want to go or how they are to get there, even though to the eye of an observer after the fact their proceedings may have an appearance of rational prevision.
This is true in a large measure even of persons, though less true of them than of the more impersonal wholes. We are seldom conscious of our personal growth in any large way; we meet details and decide as best we can, but the general flow of our time, our country, our class, our temperament, carries us along without our being definitely aware of it. It is hardly possible for us to know what is taking place in us until it is already accomplished: contemporary history, in an individual as in a nation, eludes our comprehension. A country girl finds work in a city office, and presently discovers that she has taken on the hurry and excitement of the town and cannot do without it; a student enters college and at the end of the year finds himself a different man, without having intended it, or knowing how it came about. We take one rather than another of the paths opening before us: they do not seem to diverge much, but one leads around to the west and another to the east. We do not know what choices are important and what are not. In only a few matters do we think out a policy, and in much fewer do we carry it out. As Emerson said, there is less purpose in the careers of successful men than we ascribe to them; and one could soon fill a note-book with testimony that the man and his work often find each other by mere chance. A man is hungry and plans how to get a dinner, in love and schemes to get a wife, desires power and racks his brain for ways to get it; but it can hardly be said that our intelligence is often directed to the rational organization of our character as a whole. With some men it is, certainly, but even they often find that they have failed to understand their own tendency. Martin Luther declared that “No good work comes about by our own wisdom; it begins in dire necessity. I was forced into mine; but had I known then what I know now, ten wild horses would not have drawn me into it.”
Although we are a part of the growth of impersonal forms of life we seldom know anything about it until it is well in the past. We do not know when—for obscure reasons that even the psychologist can hardly detect—we use one word rather than another, or use an old word in a new sense, that we are participating in the growth of the language organism. And yet this organism is vast, complex, logical, a marvel, apparently, of constructive ingenuity. It is the same with tradition and custom. We never tell a story or repeat an act precisely as we heard or saw it; everything is unconsciously modified by passing through us and the social medium of which we are a part, and these modifications build logical structures which human intelligence, in the course of time, may or may not discover. The students of folk-lore and primitive culture deal chiefly with such material. The working or vitality of one element of a tradition over another consists in some power to stimulate impulses in the human mind, which is, therefore, a selective agent in the process, but we are no more aware of what is going on, usually, than we are of the selective action of our digestive organs. The folkways and mores which Professor Sumner has so amply discussed are almost wholly of this nature.