The social consciousness is the widest and most sensitive receiver and transmitter so far produced. “We look before and after, and pine for what is not.” This is a social quality. As man grouped and grew together came that development of race memory which gives to family, to nation, to Humanity itself, its dignity and power. It is “Our” past, “Our” present, “Our” future. The life of Humanity is one, and it is that life which we as individuals feel; which makes us able to suffer more, enjoy more, and do more than any other kind of living thing.
In failing to recognise the real nature of society and put ourselves in right relation to it, we have largely checked the flow of social energy and perverted the social instincts and social processes; therefore, to our morbid egos, social relation often seems to bring us more pain than pleasure. We admit that we cannot live out of it—the sufferings of the hermit are greater than those of the misplaced social constituent; but we live in it blindly, in cramped and distorted positions, rendering our social service under the crushing pressure of the egoistic concept, and getting but a faint and occasional sense of the potent joy of true social relation.
The transcendent happiness possible to Humanity, to all humanity, by virtue of its humanness, is a thing of which we practically know nothing. Consider the range of sensation in an individual animal. This is most strictly limited to his physical activities and such psychic impressions and expressions as pertain to his narrow field of being. The female animal has the joy of the maternal function, that great first step beyond the Ego-consciousness; a pleasure and a pride partly physical and partly psychic, but limited forever to the individual young. The male animal sometimes shares a fraction of this parental feeling. In certain creatures which live in groups or herds there seems to be a very vivid common consciousness on some lines, as shown by the instantaneous nervous transmission in a stampede; and in the highly socialised bee and ant there appears as highly developed a collective sensorium. But, though collective, it is on a low plane; the impressions it receives and the expressions resultant all pertain to the physical wants of the individual constituents, however elaborately these wants are met.
With us, in our social relation, there is an enlargement of the sensorium past any measurement we can yet make. The size of our sensations increases as more and more individuals are tuned to respond to the same stimulus. There is room in what we call “the human heart” for a passionate exaltation of feeling that finds no parallel below us. This immense influx of stimulus prompts us, yes, forces us, to a commensurate expression; and if this expression be true, it puts in concrete form the intense feeling and then continually transmits it to as many people as are sensitive to that form of expression.
Take an illustration on a very early and simple plane. A happy, primeval squaw, not hungry, not cold, not afraid, and feeling in her already growing social consciousness both the pleasant memory of these conditions and the pleasant assurance of more, has more stimulus coming in than her body can sit quiet under. No human being can ever be as stationarily contented as a ruminating cow, his income of sensation is too great. That small, perfect circle of life of the individual beast,—hunger, effort, gratification, rest,—is changed to an endless upreaching spiral in our social relation.
It is not only that our hunger is greater because one can hunger for all; because no human being can be really satisfied till all are satisfied; but that our stimulus is greater, and calls for endless discharge. So our happy squaw is moved to transmit her press of feeling; she must discharge it in action; and she does so in some decoration of her jar or basket. This decoration is an embodied joy, and, being fixed in visible form, it then transmits that joy to as many as behold it. It is a little fountain of social energy.
A society, from its inception, multiplies the range and depth of sensation, and commensurately, the working expression of its members. From age to age, as this great common fund increases, is the power to feel and the power to do increased. More and more people thrill to a common impression; the rising wave of force prompts to ever greater expression, reaching more and more people.
Thus, in a normal society, the individual life increases in sensation, in power, and in joy in an ascending line that as yet suggests no limit. In pain and degradation also, the pessimist will protest. Of course, as an accompanying possibility. But not as an essential condition. Such as exists is merely owing to our wholly unnecessary and mistaken action. The pain is a transient and needless thing; the immense joy is in the real nature of society.
The young human creature, as he begins to grow from the individual animal period into social life, feels this intense current of force, the vast and varied desires, the vaster energies; but he does not know what it is, nor do his teachers. Ego-bound systems have cradled and nurtured him, an egoistic family, an egoistic economy, an egoistic religion cut off every avenue of growth; and the stimulus of the whole world throbs and beats in vain, forced finally into some dog-trot routine, wherein he thinks to “earn his own living,” to “support his own family,” to “save his own soul.”
The tremendous thirst for happiness which the young human being feels is perfectly natural. Young individual animals show no signs of such disproportionate desires. The tremendous ambitions of young people are equally natural. Human life is in them the multiplied and accumulated life of all humanity for all time, and all it needs for the same peace and poise which is the portion of “the lower animals” is free expression.