That last and best expression of creative force finds its material form in the things we make in the manufactured world. Take from a society its body, the structure of brick, stone, and iron, wood, cloth, leather, glass, paper,—all that elaborate compound of materials in which we live,—reduce it to a mere congregation of naked animals, and what would ensue? Those animals would either rebuild in desperate haste the material forms in which alone Society exists, or they would relapse into individual savagery. If too small a group, or too highly specialised to reproduce the social body to live in, they would be unable even to revert to savagery and would simply die. The Social Soul we have seen to be a common consciousness developed by common activities. The Social Body is a common material form, also developed by common activities. Both appear in proportion to the extent and development of those activities.
As house and vehicle for the spirit of an animal has been slowly evolved the cunning mechanism of bone and muscle, with all its constituent organs, in which a man lives. It is but a combination of chemicals and minerals, and when the soul is out of it they disintegrate and revert to lower combinations. As house and vehicle for the spirit of society has been slowly evolved the more cunning and elaborate mechanism of wood and cloth, brick, stone, metal—in which Humanity lives. It too is but a combination of chemicals and minerals, and when its inhabiting humanity is gone, it too disintegrates and reverts, though more slowly. The bones of dead societies remain to us in stone and glass and pottery, as do the bones of extinct animals.
An animal life, once started in the germ, goes on growing, i. e., making to itself a body suitable to its soul. If you arrest the growth of the body,—if, for instance, a baby’s head were cased in iron,—you would arrest the growth of the soul. It would have one, potentially; that is, it would if its brain had room for it, but actually you would have checked it. So the social life, once started, goes on assimilating material particles and recombining them in mechanical form, enlarging its functions as it enlarges the structure through which alone they become possible. Society builds its body for good or ill.
A piece of human creation—a manufactured article—is the record, the physical manifestation of our humanness. By these things, reading backward, does the ethnologist reconstruct the vanished races as the paleontologist reconstructs a vanished beast from fossil bones. A bead, a knife, a needle, some torque or bracelet, a broken jar,—and the lost people rise before us.
Man, to be such and such, requires such and such things, and evolves them as naturally as the sea-beast makes its shell. It grows from him—so do our manufactures grow from us. Society secretes, as it were, the manufactured article. We need clothes, for instance, a purely social need. The individual animal does not need clothes. He carries his wardrobe on his back. Never a solitary creature in clothes. Clothes are for other people more than the wearer. Other people are required to make them. Even in a one-generation-reversion, as of some hunting hermit of modern times,—back he goes to buckskin! He cannot shear and card, weave and spin, bleach and dye, cut and sew. Back he goes to borrow some other animal’s skin; and, if he stayed a hunting hermit for enough generations, back would he go to his own skin and its natural growth of hair.
But the increasing social faculties and desires—the love of ornament, the sense of decency, the need of concealment, the demand for a more fluent and delicate expression of personality—these call for clothes, and society evolves them through a thousand trades.
A trade is a social function, and clothing is a social product as hair is a product of the individual body. In the thing made lies our social history so fully that, had we a full line of specimens, we should need no other monument of progress.
The progress of each age rests on its things: the unchipped flint and the polished; the bronze knife and the steel; the wonder-working wheel (how much of social progress goes “on wheels”!); the bow and arrow, the sword, the axe, the spade,—small things for separate use at first,—and then the marvellous, monster engines of to-day; they are at once the means and the record of progress. There is a phase of thought which despises “material things,” and prattles ardently of our “spiritual nature.” But in steady-marching ages of coincidence man’s spiritual nature manifests itself through material things, and grows by means of them. The ships of Tyre made possible that Phœnician civilisation which has so affected the Grecian and all that follow. The roads of Rome knit and fastened her Empire to the ends of the earth.
Axe-man, bow-man, swords-man, plough-man, boatman, pen-man,—there is a steady likeness between man’s things and man. As there is the same likeness between the spirit and the body of each animal, so man, having the new, wide, aspiring, endless, social soul, manifests its growth in ceaseless progression of manufacture, in developing this vast body of Society. The human soul is greater than the animal’s because it has a greater body to live in—complex, universal.
One marvellous power that is ours by virtue of these things is that whereas they do not grow on us personally, we remain somewhat free of their inexorable reaction.