Human Work

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Some deny the organic concept of society on the ground that we human beings have no “common sensorium.” But we have. The most conspicuous and distinctive fact in our psychology is precisely that common sensorium. We call it in ordinary speech “the human heart,” or “the human spirit,” or “soul,” and quite correctly. It is human, and “human” is “social”; it is the social soul.

The individual feels it, inasmuch as the brain, our medium of sensation, is lodged in an individual head; but what he feels is a common feeling, not a personal one. He has of course his purely individual range of sensations, emotions, promptings to action; but these are felt also by any other animal, they are not “human.”

All our distinctive human feelings are in common, are transmissible, belong to us collectively, not individually. So markedly true is this that we have labelled our most visibly collective feelings “humane.” Common feeling is human feeling, and that great sum of higher consciousness we call the soul is the human soul.

Psychological terms are all vague and slippery to handle; but we can clearly observe in any living thing these two departments—the spirit and the body. While they are together the thing lives, works, goes; when divided the body gradually disintegrates.

We observe, too, that once a specific allotment of spirit makes to itself such and such a form, that the form continually reacts upon the spirit and modifies it. Each animal as we know it has a spirit exactly suited to his body, evidently the result of long lodgment in it. The sheep has a spirit suited to his body, the cat has a spirit suited to his body. Each can do what he wants to and wants to do what he can.

If we can imagine the two transformed and trans-spirited,—the spirit of a cat in the body of a sheep and the spirit of a sheep in the body of a cat,—it is plain to see how grievous would be the condition of that beast. It would want to do what it could not, and could not do what it wanted to. Spirit must fit body, or body fit spirit, or the two disband and that creature is dead.

This relation holds in the life of Society; but as that life is large, complex, enduring, and comprises within it not only the lives of its constituent individuals, but the lives of its constituent institutions, the facts are not so easy to follow. Taken historically it may be observed thus: from the small, early social forms of the tribe and its villages up to the nation and its cities we see this relation of body and spirit. “A body of men” of any kind that lives, i. e., works, must have a common spirit or it cannot so live and work.

The loosest mob must have some transient but compelling spirit to hold it together, else no mob. The smallest village has its common spirit; and the largest city—the largest nation—must have its common spirit, to live, to grow, to work. We are familiar with some terms of these facts; we know, appreciate, and condemn the absence of “the civic spirit.” We admire and reward “public spirit.” We have to deal with the facts of Society’s organic life, even while those graveyard brains of ours are still crowded with the monuments of dead concepts.

In popular literature and oratory we freely handle such terms as “animated by a common spirit,” “the national spirit,” the “spirit of our institutions,” “l’esprit de corps”; but we have not set our minds to work to grasp and relate these terms in their full meaning. We are familiar also with the reactive modification of social forms on the social spirit; seeing men of all characters enter some definite institution and come out all more or less altered to one distinctive character, the academic, the military, or whatever; and to us the largest, newest, most gratifying proof of this is the effect of our American institutions on the people of all nations. In organising this nation we embodied the best spirit of the time in a certain form of government and invited all men to come and enter the new national body. They did, and a more marked and rapid modification of spirit by form history has never shown. Come from wheresoever they may, their children enter our educational, their parents our industrial and political institutions; and they forthwith become Americans, manifesting our virtues—and our faults—with startling rapidity. The effect is strongest on the young and composite races, and weakest on the older established stocks, as the Chinese and Hebrew, but it is perceptible in all.

In smaller instance we all know the effect of a given school or college on those entering it,—either teacher or learner, but especially the learner, as more young and impressible,—as shown in “the Harvard spirit,” or that of Oxford, or of Yale. When fighting was the dominant activity we had the natural growth of fighting bodies, elaborately organised, and of a common fighting spirit which completely overmasters the individual spirit of its constituents. If specific religious practices are pursued we have the appearance of a religious body and its accompanying spirit.