The same considerations may serve to qualify our democratic criticism of hereditary wealth and of the class differences based upon it. The man with an inherited competence is in a position to separate himself from the rush of competition enough to make a fresh estimate of things, and to use his independence as a fulcrum for starting a new movement. No doubt the great majority fail to do this; it requires other qualifications than pecuniary; still, much fruitful initiative in science, art, literature and social reform has in fact been supplied by people having this advantage, and until we provide for leisure and independence in some other way the argument for hereditary wealth will have force. In the same way the finest ideals of life and conduct—as distinguished, possibly, from the highest ideals—have often been the tradition of an upper class, upon which their continuance depended. If we are to dispense with upper classes we must at the same time provide for continuous culture groups of a more democratic sort.
It is much the same with national variation as with that of individuals and groups. Bagehot, in the earliest and perhaps the ablest attempt to apply Darwinism to society, pointed out that “all great nations have been prepared in privacy and in secret. They have been composed far away from all distraction. Greece, Rome, Judea, were framed each by itself, and the antipathy of each to men of different race and different speech is one of their most marked peculiarities, and quite their strongest common property.”[[76]] In modern life, however, as nations come to share consciously and with good-will in a common organic life, this differentiation should not be one of isolation or antipathy, but of pride in a distinctive contribution to the higher life of the world. I need hardly add that the independence and individuality of small nations—which has seemed to be threatened—is essential to the general good.
Immigration is another topic that might well be considered from the standpoint of variety of ideas. We need as many kinds of people as possible, provided they are good kinds, because their various temperaments and capacities enrich our life. This seems true biologically, as regards diversity of natural stocks, and applies also to the ideals and habits of thought that immigrants bring with them. Our self-esteem naturally depreciates these contributions, but it is fairly clear that after a long course of pioneer life and crude industrialism we are in a position to profit by culture elements that even the peasantry of an older civilization may supply. The Slavs, Italians, Jews, and others who have recently come to America in such numbers have many things to learn from us, but beyond doubt they have also much to teach.
Certainly it is a mistake to attempt to suppress foreign customs or languages by any kind of coercion. It is true that a common language, at least, is necessary to assimilation, but this will come naturally if our social attitude is hospitable and our schools efficient. Moreover, a too sudden or compulsory break with the past is a bad thing, impairing self-respect and stability of character. Those who cherish what is best in the old life will make all the better members of the new. Such trouble as we have had with our immigrants, in regard to assimilation, is almost negligible, compared with the complete failure of harsher methods in Europe.
The larger discussion involves a struggle for survival among innumerable ideas, springing from the innumerable diversities of person, class, and situation. One naturally inquires what causes some of these ideas to survive and prevail rather than others. What makes the success or failure of a principle or a project?
Some writers will answer this question for us by pointing to specific factors which they think are decisive—though they by no means agree as to what these are—but I take it that the determining agent is nothing less than the total situation, which we must grasp as a whole in order to see the trend of things. The life of an idea depends upon the degree and manner of its working in the actual complex state of the mind of the people, consisting largely of impulses, habits, and traditions whose sources are remote and obscure. Take, for example, the change in our ideas regarding the functions and problems of women, indicated by the contrast between the literature of the nineteenth century and that of to-day. Certain reasons can be given for it, such as the growing self-dependence and class-consciousness of women, their employment in modern industry and the popularization of social and biological science. These and many other elements are worked up by discussion, producing an atmosphere in which the conventions of fifty years ago seem prudish and absurd. A novel, a play, or a social programme will succeed now which our fathers and mothers would have suppressed.
I doubt whether rules can be formulated which will help us much in interpreting the state of the social mind and predicting what success a given proposition will have. The attempts which have been made in this direction, such as those of Tarde in his Logique sociale, seem to me mechanical and unilluminating. If we accept the view that the higher intelligence is a complex imaginative synthesis, there is little reason for expecting help from such rules. What is necessary is that the interpreter and prophet shall have the knowledge and vision to reproduce in himself the essential influences of the time, and so, by a dramatic process, carry on the movement in his imagination and foresee the outcome. No formula of psychological selection will be of much use. Life is not subject to such formulas.
If an idea is quite incapable of working in the actual situation, if there is no soil in which it can grow, people will take no interest in it, it will not “take hold” anywhere, but come and go as a mere flitting impression, not even achieving definite statement. It is certain that ideas not infrequently occur to men which will later be esteemed as great truths, but are rejected by those to whom they occur because they do not kindle in the actual trend of thought. This was the case with the Darwinian idea of development through the survival of the fittest; several persons who are known, and probably others who are not known, having seen it vaguely long before Darwin, and it came to power only when the situation was ripe.
It is particularly true of social and moral ideals, since these are never novel or obscure in themselves, but are old thoughts renewed and illuminated from time to time by successive waves of faith. The Christian conception of a society of brothers with God as a loving father, is probably older than civilization, and can never have been far from men’s desires. The case is much the same with the idea of democracy, with Rousseau’s idea of the nobility of human nature and the depravity of institutions, and with Kant’s moral imperative.
Even if an idea impresses an individual here and there it can hardly hold its ground without some kind of group support. Thus Hamerton says of the development of ideas in art: “The taste and knowledge of their contemporaries usually erect impassable barriers around artists. If there is no feeling or desire for a certain order of truth on the part of the public, the artist will have no stimulus to study that order of truth; nay, if he does study and render it, he will incur insult and abuse, and be thereby driven back into the line of subject and treatment which his contemporaries understand.”[[77]]