The pressure of the great thing has been so beyond our visible ego that we have been forced to account for it by the hypothesis of personal immortality. There was evidently no room for the soul—no explanation of the soul—in one human life as we saw it before us. “But,” said we, “if we make a human life long enough there will be room for the soul! That will give us time to understand it, and to gratify these quenchless aspirations, these boundless desires.”
It did not occur to us that if we made it wide enough it would have the same effect. Our illimitable egoism, being unable to satisfy its own demands by any earthly means, has postulated an eternal ego, with whole ranges of planetary systems to feed in, and hopes, in course of eternity, time not being enough, to satisfy Itself!
And so, postponing the problems it could not answer to a conveniently extensive after life; and considering its own agonies and contortions in this life as part and parcel of the great game between God and the Devil; it has struggled and suffered on; pushed relentlessly upward by the organic social forces, held down most cruelly by its self-made bands of iron; the rigid clamps of primitive ignorance renewed from generation to generation, in spite of the increasing agony of the growing soul.
No wonder we are more unhappy than we used to be; we are bigger, much bigger, but the ego hasn’t grown at all. The social spirit of a small young society could masquerade as an ego without too painful inconvenience; but the social spirit of the world to-day is so vast, so strong, so much nearer to expression in our more developed minds, so much more commonly felt, owing to our more equal education, that its confinement to an ego is too agonising to endure,—it is simply impossible.
Therefore we see the steady growth of “public spirit,”—“civic feeling,” national and international movements toward general improvement; more and more individuals, rich and poor, devoting themselves to social service; the growing objection to war; the tendency to distribute as well as to accumulate millions; the development of “the home church”; and even—most hopeful of all these splendid signs of life—even the rising current of organisation among women.
This Ego hypothesis might as well be laid aside at once and forever. We are not separate creatures at all, our life is ours, and only so to be rightly lived. It is so easy,—leaving off the ego-theory,—to observe the natural growth of the social spirit in its ever-broadening, steady pressure and in those bursts of irresistible energy we call passion.
Any intense human feeling we call a passion, using the word to distinguish certain main lines of feeling common to us all, as “the maternal passion,” “the tender passion,” and those broad divisions Hate, Fear, Envy, Remorse, Ambition, Grief, Revenge. Also some special gust of intensity in minor lines of feeling is distinguished by the same word, “a passion of gratitude,” “a passion of loneliness,” “a passion of rebellion,” or of avarice.
Our words climb slowly along the facts, changing as our perception changes, and always behind. Heat as a fact we observed and used long before we knew what to call it, if, indeed, what we call it now is any more true than it was before. But, whether “a fluid” named Caloric, or “a force” named Heat, the fact which we all know and use remains the same. It did its work in the world as fully before we came as after; before we named it at all as after. But to us, to our consciousness, the thing does not exist until we see it, and, seeing, name.
“The maternal passion” is as strong a force in mother-wasp and mother-whale as in the most sophisticated and analytic mother-human. These passions are simply accumulations of stored energy along certain much-used lines, and serve to keep up a steady flow of the desired energy when there is no immediate stimulus to call for it. In the maternal passion, for instance, long ages of iron experience have developed a certain average of watchfulness and care even when the young are visibly safe, and a surprising fund of power and fury in defence of the young even when the exciting cause is comparatively small. It keeps up a safer average of care and defence than if the feeling were merely reactionary, and has therefore been developed in surviving species.
Society, the vast and varied organism in which we live, calls for a devotion more single and fearless than that even of the mother; for a steady average of service and a sudden fund of fury in defence, a love and care and courage higher than any heretofore required; and as it needs such a feeling it gets it. Those societies having it most highly developed survive. We have called it many names; let us now give it another, the Social Passion.