Once more, a small and literal instance: if a charitable body is founded,—an “institution” in that limited and unlovely sense,—in the “inmates,” both officials and beneficiaries, speedily appears the spirit of that body, and a very disagreeable one it is. Wherever interdependent functions are established appears organic life; a common body to perform these functions, a common spirit to co-relate them.
The social spirit is a common consciousness developed by common activities, and appearing in us in proportion to the extent and interrelation of those activities. To share in it demands of the individual, male or female, a share in the collective activities which constitute human life.
Activities performed by one’s self alone, for one’s self alone, or one’s immediate physical relatives, are not distinctively human, and do not develop the human spirit.
An agricultural population manifests certain traits in common the world over. Distinctions of blood and of religion are in abeyance before the unifying force of a common industry as a modifier of character. Fishermen, or sailors, or miners, or traders invariably show marked traits in common, however otherwise differentiated.
If all men followed one industry we should have one principal character; but fortunately our social processes are increasingly varied. There does arise, however, a steadily widening field of common character as the traits demanded by all industries alike increase among us. All industries require peace and self-control; a regard for law and for organisation; and these tendencies steadily improve the social spirit as we leave savagery farther and farther behind.
Commerce requires honesty and accuracy, and steadily develops them, though commerce is more open to certain retroactive influences than the directly productive processes. Productive industry, being the economic necessity which brings us together, is the source of our social spirit, and that spirit is constantly modified by changes in the forms of industry.
Our social consciousness is of slow and partial development, as is easily explicable. The highly developed personal consciousness which the most primitive savage brought with him into social relation, and which occupies the same field of sensation as the wider social consciousness, has operated to prevent easy recognition of the latter. The social pleasures and the social pains we took to be personal and sought or avoided them as such. Even the most sublimated and morbidly acute social consciousness, as shown in a passionate philanthropy, is still diagnosed by some as a form of self-gratification, so persistent is the dominance of the egoistic concept.
Another reason is that as our external activities, requiring conscious cerebration, are more perceptible than our internal ones, so we were far more easily impressed by the external activities of Society than by its deep-seated organic processes; these external ones were more telic, partook more of the nature of personal actions, and were readily thought to be such.
A third and very strong force operating against our recognition of social consciousness is that it so generally hurts. So long as our organic social processes went on normally they were unconscious. Individual man, well fed, well guarded, reproducing the race in peace and comfort, sported in the sea of social well-being and failed to observe that there was such a thing. But let any industry become inflamed, or paralysed, or arrested, and the pain is felt far and wide. No one likes to be hurt. The more socially we felt our pain the more it hurt, of course, being bigger. To be hungry one’s self is one thing—to feel a famine is another. People with the most social consciousness suffered most, so long as social processes were not healthy; and, therefore, our effort has been to resist the increase of social consciousness.
We say “mind your own business”—“don’t concern yourself about other people,” “let the other man walk.” We try not to feel the famine in India, the flood in China, the ignorance in Russia, the cruelty in Armenia, the crimes and casualties, the deformities and diseases of our own great cities. But in spite of our natural reluctance to a widening of the sensorium that thrills most to pain, it is widening in spite of us.