All genera and species and families and individuals are so many forms in which the radiant energy of the sun has deposited itself. Playing with its heat and its light upon soil, sea, and sky, the sun has built the myriad organic forms we see. So all objects, interests, and laws embraced within the range of civilization are the forms in which social force, arising through relations, has deposited itself. Human language itself is an embodiment of social force. The grammars of different languages actually advertise the social status and condition of the peoples who used them. In the Chinese language we have no distinction as to parts of speech, thus showing that the national consciousness was arrested at the stage of paternalism in government. The ancient Romans put enormous stress upon the will. They formulated the laws by which men are still regulated in civilized social life. A hint of this we get in the Latin language, by the small use made of the pronoun. Ideas, too, are expressions of translated social energy. Nothing seems to be more insulated than the human brain, by the aid of which the mind does its thinking. Out of sight and out of touch, within the dark depths of its own mysterious home, it would appear to be shut up to absolute solitude. Here, at least, we would expect to find individual, independent work. But not so. No individual brain can think, only as it uses the brains of others in the process. Homer’s Iliad is a poetic formulation of what all Greece felt. The elements of myth, thought, passion, which it contains, were all in the contemporary Greek mind. In committing this poem to memory, the Greeks were but storing up their own thoughts.
Hegel, in thinking out his remarkable system of philosophy, used the brains of all the men who had preceded him in the difficult work of solving the problems of existence. Darwin saw much in nature, because, through relation, he was able to look through the eyes of all naturalists.
All values, whether in soil, waterfalls, precious stones, or money, are forms of social force. Land in a great city sells for two thousand dollars a front foot, because millions of people, drawn by the powers of commerce, have come into fellowship upon it. Robinson Crusoe would have given all the money he had on the ship for a loaf of bread. The heaps of gold and silver in Wall Street are so valuable, because seventy millions of people are circulating around them.
Moral laws are social products. They are not empirical, but fundamental, eternal, and essential. They inhere in the constitution of man. But it is only through relation that man comes to the recognition of them, as binding for conduct. Light and heat have their laws, definite and unfailing, but if natural particles never vibrated at a rate sufficient to create these forces, the laws would not appear. They arise along with the forces, and the same conditions which give rise to the forces, give rise to the laws. So moral laws accompany a certain degree of attainment and culture, only possible through relation.
Religion itself, the highest and most sacred deposit of human life, is a product of social force. Whether we regard it as “modes of emotion,” as Lecky; or the “recognition of all our duties as divine commands,” as Kant; or as “awe in the presence of the mystery of an inscrutable power in the universe,” as Spencer; or as “the infinite nature of duty,” as Mill; or as “the immediate feeling of the dependence of man on God,” as Schleiermacher, it never arises outside the range of relation. Still, religion is something constitutional, inalienable, divine; but man would never be thrilled by its hopes, or soothed by its peace, did he not stand in vital relation to his fellows. The elements and raw material of religion are eternally present, but relation calls into exercise the susceptibilities and faculties which appropriate these elements and raw material, turning them into hymns, theologies, prayers, sacrifices, liturgies, and ceremonies.
Commerce, by bringing men together under the necessities of finding food, clothing, shelter, enables them to find their intellects and what they can know, their hearts and what they can love, and their wills and what they can do.
Thus we trace the genesis of social force, with the expressions which it makes of itself, in property, literature, law, art, and religion, to mutual human relations, for the establishment of which, among men, Commerce seems to have been ordained. If men could, without trading, have found the means of subsistence, as do the foxes and the lions; then no relations in the high sense of the term would have been established among them; and like the foxes and the lions, they would have remained on the earth without progress and without history.
The sun must be making tremendous drafts upon some unseen sources of power, to be able to make, throughout the solar realm, such ample expenditures of energy without bankruptcy.
The location of the vast depositories of power, upon which he draws so liberally, we are not to inquire here. We do know that the force which builds the forest, flushes the meadows with green, braids the vines into festoons, and peoples the plant-world, comes from the sun. Wherever the materials which keep the sun’s fires burning come from, they must pass up to that center before they are available for service on this globe. The stamp and superscription of the sun must be upon them before they can take the form of grass, or leaf, or bird on the earth. In this sense stand human relations between the force contained in the individual, unrelated life, and the force which takes form in the objects of civilization. The crude and inarticulate force in the individuals of the tribe, or the nomads who only touch for war or passion, must be refined through moral, political, and spiritual relations before it is ready to take the form of poem, anthem, temple, or Plato.