“They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.
“Not one is dissatisfied; not one is demented with the mania for owning things.
“Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived a thousand years ago.
“Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.”
—Whitman.
This reversionary tendency is strong in us all, the easy backsliding to the physical freedom and independence of the hunter and fisher. The immediate stimulus, the immediate action, the supply of one’s own needs by one’s own efforts,—this is a delight to almost all of us; and some are constantly straggling and dropping behind the procession, to revert to the wood life of primitive man and his pre-primitive forbears, to “turn and live with the animals.” Current literature is full of this social reversion to-day, this “call of the wild,” this tempting invitation to give it all up and go back to the beginning.
It is so much harder to pour your life’s energies a life long into the Social pool, and perhaps get very little out—and then not what you want. What deep inevitable gain has been at work for which relentless nature has slowly driven us up the path of Social Evolution—a steeper, bloodier, more agonising road than any other creature has had to tread?
The gain is this (and observe that it is precisely of the same nature as that which has driven the contented annelid up to all the excitement, difficulties, and perils of the higher mammalian): the Social Organism manifests a wider range of consciousness and activity than any other life-form. The human animal, alone, is but a beast; and has but the narrow egoistic range of consciousness and activity. As part of Society the human animal becomes the organ of a consciousness and an activity so vast that in its limitless expansion we have been able to conceive of Life, Death, and Immortality, of Time and Eternity, of Humanity, of Liberty, Justice, and Love. What we call the human soul is developed in the social relation. It is Human indeed, i. e., Social. It is Ours.
In the organic division of labour of a physical body, the life processes are so developed that more exertion can be made and more sensation received, than in the same amount of living matter in lower forms. A hand, taken separately, would have a certain contractile power; but as connected with the arm it has far more, as connected with the general nervous system more yet.
In that transmission of energy which seems to be the business of the universe an increasing complexity of mechanism is evidently called for because it has been produced and maintained. Society is the most complex mechanism of all. It can receive, store, and discharge more energy than could its constituents in equal number, but unorganised.