The social mass that constricts and squeezes the single life until the virility of self-assertion and the right of private initiative are destroyed, is no improvement on Bedouin isolation. The latter brutalizes life, while the former eviscerates it. The eye does not lose its capacity for sight, and its place of peculiar responsibility by being brought into reciprocal relations along with other organs in the same body. It would have no meaning and no power of vision apart from relations with other organs. The ear is not discounted, nor are its wonderful functions belittled amid the manifold members which work together in the same human frame. Its position of honor is secured to it by the organic relations it sustains to the other members. The foot, the hand, and the tongue find themselves and their uses as they unite together in one living whole. The lone Bedouin, with no laws and no relations, seems to have all liberty, but in reality he has none. He is as completely without meaning as would be the finger separated from the hand. The man of whom nature is a prophecy is not the being in the woods whose home is a cave and whose food is wild meat; but it is the man in society, whose home all woods and metals and stones have helped to build, and whose food all soils and skies and seas have helped to produce.
The emphasis is to be kept on the social side of human nature, because it is through that side of himself that man is to pass into the world-wide work and the glorious destiny for which he is fitted. Through that side of himself he moves out into order, and strength, and freedom. All men whose names are cherished in history, passed into place, influence, and honor through the social side of human nature.
In passing through the social side of himself, the life man finds is a million times larger and richer than the life he loses. That men might find the life that belonged to them, the only life worth living, the tendency from the first has been toward the solidarity of the race. The relations growing out of such solidarity are constitutive of the being of each man. The important properties of an acid cannot be known, when it is considered out of relation with an alkali. What a thing is for another, that it is in itself. So what a man is through relations with others, that he is in himself. But what he is in himself cannot be known until he comes into relations with others.
Solidarity is not to swamp single lives, but single lives are to come to all that is peculiar and high in themselves through solidarity. The universe is to preserve relations with each private spirit. By the organization of men into one social whole, provision is made for each man to participate in the life of humanity. It is intended that all the oceans of life shall reach, through their waves, the shores of each man’s being, and leave deposits of all their wealth in each man’s spirit. When we speak of the horse, the eagle, the whale, it is understood that we are using generic terms, and are intended to refer to no particular horse or eagle or whale. Yet in each horse the species is reproduced, and in each eagle the species is epitomized, and in each whale the whole whale type is summarized. This is done in the case of the lower animals, without their thought or volition. No universal relations are necessary among whales, for each whale to have within itself all the peculiarities and furnishments possessed by all whales. The species are to be realized in each man, too; but this is to be accomplished through social relations among all men. All the men in the world must touch each man, to call forth the capacities which lie folded within his life. Humanity, as parcelled out in nations, generations, epochs, must lift itself into the being of each man; as the ocean, parcelled out in Atlantics, Pacifics, Indians, Arctics, Antarctics, lifts itself into each wave.
Power, parcelled out in gravitation, heat, and electricity surrounding the globe; advertised in every apple’s fall, declared in every flash from the clouds, and present in every sunbeam; stands ready to make universal brotherhood, not simply an ideal, running through the dreams of poets and prophets, but an actual fact. The recognition of power, as the provision made for the social nature of man, is enabling us to realize the dreams of prophets and poets.
TRUTH.
“A century is a formula; an epoch is an expressed thought. One such thought-expressed civilization passes to another. The centuries are the phrases of civilization; what she says here she does not repeat there. But these mysterious phrases are linked together: logic—the logos—is within them, and their series constitutes progress. In all these, phrase expressions of a single thought, the divine thought, we are slowly deciphering the word fraternity.