V
THE GROUP PROCESS: THE COLLECTIVE WILL
FROM the group process arise social understanding and true sympathy. At the same moment appears the social will which is the creative will. Many writers are laying stress on the possibilities of the collective will; what I wish to emphasize is the necessity of creating the collective will. Many people talk as if the collective will were lying round loose to be caught up whenever we like, but the fact is we must go to our group and see that it is brought into existence.
Moreover, we go to our group to learn the process. We sometimes hear the advantages of collective planning spoken of as if an act of Congress or Parliament could substitute collective for individual planning! But it is only by doing the deed that we shall learn this doctrine. We learn how to create the common will in our groups, and we learn here not only the process but its value. When I can see that agreement with my neighbor for larger ends than either of us is pursuing alone is of the same essence as capital and labor learning to think together, as Germany and the Allies evolving a common will, then I am ready to become a part of the world process. To learn how to evolve the social will day by day with my neighbors and fellow-workers is what the world is demanding of me to-day. This is getting into the inner workshop of democracy.
Until we learn this lesson war cannot stop, no constructive work can be done. The very essence and substance of democracy is the creating of the collective will. Without this activity the forms of democracy are useless, and the aims of democracy are always unfulfilled. Without this activity both political and industrial democracy must be a chaotic, stagnating, self-stultifying assemblage. Many of the solutions offered to-day for our social problems are vitiated by their mechanical nature, by assuming that if society were given a new form, the socialistic for instance, what we desire would follow. But this assumption is not true. The deeper truth, perhaps the deepest, is that the will to will the common will is the core, the germinating centre of that large, still larger, ever larger life which we are coming to call the true democracy.
VI
THE UNITY OF THE SOCIAL PROCESS
WE have seen that the common idea and the common will are born together in the social process. One does not lead to the other, each is involved in the other. But the collective thought and the collective will are not yet complete, they are hardly an embryo. They carry indeed within themselves their own momentum, but they complete themselves only through activity in the world of affairs, of work, of government. This conception does away with the whole discussion, into which much ardor has gone, of the priority of thought or action in the social life. There is no order. The union of thought and will and activity by which the clearer will is generated, the social process, is a perfect unity.