IV
SOME FALSE CONCEPTS
As we shall frequently have to refer to certain major errors in popular thought, it will be as well to clearly enumerate and describe those selected. The field is wide,—each of those mentioned connects with many others,—and there may be serious question as to which antedates which; but difference on that point will not invalidate the actuality of their influence on conduct. The group mentioned in this chapter will be further described and elaborated later; this is merely to introduce them in some order for reference.
The first, and here assumed to be the basic error in the human mind, the parent of almost all the others, is the Ego concept. This is the universal assumption, based on a pre-human status when it was true, that human beings are separate entities, like the lower animals.
As animals we are separate, and, when we first began to think, the animal life was so enormously preponderant, and the human life so weak, so vague, so intermittently realised, that it was quite natural we should carry over the sense of personal entity into the social entity. That we have a separate personal consciousness is not denied, but it is not humanity. The human consciousness is collective, as we shall see later.
Our mistake has been, not in retaining the Ego concept, which is as necessary in its place as the concept of a leg or a liver, but in failing to grasp the larger inclusive Social concept. All the complex organic phenomena of social life we have continually tried to construe in terms of the individual. The distinctive features of human life are invariably social. No one trait or power of our great race but what must be accounted for in its development and understood in its use as a social factor.
“We” are human, “I” am an animal, save as “I,” being part of Society, embody and represent it. The discord and mischief which would be wrought in a physical organism by any absurd pretence of individual life and interest on the part of its organs, is precisely the discord and misery wrought in our social organism by the persistence of this archaic idea.
Another error, most deeply basic in its logical relation, though perhaps not so early recognised by the conscious mind, is our general belief that pleasure lies wholly—or even mainly—in impression. Like the first, it dates from a pre-social status, is the governing theory of personal animal life, and has not been removed and replaced by truer views as social life is developed.
The individual animal having no functions but those of maintenance, reproduction, and improvement, and accomplishing his improvement only along lines of personal heredity, acted only toward those ends, and remained at rest when those ends were served. Pleasure led and pain drove him to the attainment of the means to these ends of this fulfilment, so he early learned to associate pleasure with getting what he wanted,—pain with the lack of it,—a perfectly true concept as far as it went. But as the individual animal’s activities are promptly reactionary, and not matters of conscious judgment and volition, he never took into account the pleasure inherent in action, in the discharge of energy, and the pain equally inherent in the prevention of such discharge.
The nerves bring to us sense of pain and pleasure: certain currents feel good to them, certain others bad. An inflow of warmth is a pleasure; increase the vibration, make it heat, it becomes pain, agony, torture. The sensory nerves bring to us their burden of impression, the consciousness we call enjoyment or dislike; but have the motory nerves no burden? Are the currents of energy going out not as perceptible as those coming in? To the individual animal they are not; he does not “feel himself work” particularly. His consciousness is in his income, not in his output.
But the social creature comes under different conditions. His range of activity increases, both in complexity and power; he has an enlarging fund of energy to discharge and a thousand complicated avenues to discharge it through. Moreover, this discharge is no longer a personal affair of his own arms and legs, but involves concurrent action of many others.