People often talk of the social mind as if it were an abstract conception, as if only the individual were real, concrete. The two are equally real. Or rather the only reality is the relating of one to the other which creates both. Our sundering is as artificial and late an act as the sundering of consciousness into subject and object. The only reality is the interpenetrating of the two into experience. Late intellectualism abstracts for practical purposes the ego from the world, the individual from society.
But there is no way of separating individuals, they coalesce and coalesce, they are “confluent,” to use the expression of James, who tells us that the chasm between men is an individualistic fiction, that we are surrounded by fringes, that these overlap and that by means of these I join with others. It is as in Norway when the colors of the sunset and the dawn are mingling, when to-day and to-morrow are at the point of breaking, or of uniting, and one does not know to which one belongs, to the yesterday which is fading or the coming hour—perhaps this is something like the relation of one to another: to the onlookers from another planet our colors might seem to mingle.
The truth about the individual and society has been already implied, but it may be justifiable to develop the idea further because of the paramount importance for all our future development of a clear understanding of the individual. Our nineteenth-century legal theory (individual rights, contract, “a man can do what he likes with his own,” etc.) was based on the conception of the separate individual.[[21]] We can have no sound legal doctrine, and hence no social or political progress, until the fallacy of this idea is fully recognized. The new state must rest on a true conception of the individual. Let us ask ourselves therefore for a further definition of individuality than that already implied.
The individual is the unification of a multiplied variety of reactions. But the individual does not react to society. The interplay constitutes both society on the one hand and individuality on the other: individuality and society are evolving together from this constant and complex action and reaction. Or, more accurately, the relation of the individual to society is not action and reaction, but infinite interactions by which both individual and society are forever a-making: we cannot say if we would be exact that the individual acts upon and is acted upon, because that way of expressing it implies that he is a definite, given, finished entity, and would keep him apart merely as an agent of the acting and being acted on. We cannot put the individual on one side and society on the other, we must understand the complete interrelation of the two. Each has no value, no existence without the other. The individual is created by the social process and is daily nourished by that process. There is no such thing as a self-made man. What we think we possess as individuals is what is stored up from society, is the subsoil of social life. We soak up and soak up and soak up our environment all the time.
Of what then does the individuality of a man consist? Of his relation to the whole, not (1) of his apartness nor (2) of his difference alone.
Of course the mistake which is often made in thinking of the individual is that of confusing the physical with the real individual. The physical individual is seen to be apart and therefore apartness is assumed of the psychic or real individual. We think of Edward Fitzgerald as a recluse, that he got his development by being alone, that he was largely outside the influences of society. But imagine Fitzgerald’s life with his books. It undoubtedly did not suit his nature to mix freely with other people in bodily presence, but what a constant and vivid living with others his life really was. How closely he was in vital contact with the thoughts of men.
We must bear in mind that the social spirit itself may impose apartness on a man; the method of uniting with others is not always that of visible, tangible groups. The pioneer spirit is the creative spirit even if it seems to take men apart to fulfil its dictates. On the other hand the solitary man is not necessarily the man who lives alone; he may be one who lives constantly with others in all the complexity of modern city life, but who is so shut-up or so set upon his own ideas that he makes no real union with others.
Individuality is the capacity for union. The measure of individuality is the depth and breadth of true relation. I am an individual not as far as I am apart from, but as far as I am a part of other men. Evil is non-relation. The source of our strength is the central supply. You may as well break a branch off the tree and expect it to live. Non-relation is death.
I have said that individuality consists neither of the separateness of one man from the other, nor of the differences of one man from the other. The second statement is challenged more often than the first. This comes from some confusion of ideas. My individuality is difference springing into view as relating itself with other differences. The act of relating is the creating act. It is vicious intellectualism to say, “Before you relate you must have things to relate, therefore the differences are more elemental: there are (1) differences which (2) unite, therefore uniting is secondary.” The only fact, the only truth, is the creative activity which appears as the great complex we call humanity. The activity of creating is all. It is only by being this activity that we grasp it. To view it from the outside, to dissect it into its different elements, to lay these elements on the dissecting table as so many different individuals, is to kill the life and feed the fancy with dead images, empty, sterile concepts. But let us set about relating ourselves to our community in fruitful fashion, and we shall see that our individuality is bodying itself forth in stronger and stronger fashion, our difference shaping itself in exact conformity with the need of the work we do.
For we must remember when we say that the essence of individuality is the relating of self to other difference, that difference is not something static, something given, that it also is involved in the world of becoming. This is what experience teaches me—that society needs my difference, not as an absolute, but just so much difference as will relate me. Differences develop within the social process and are united through the social process. Difference which is not capable of relation is eccentricity. Eccentricity, caprice, put me outside, bring anarchy; true spontaneity, originality, belong not to chaos but to system. But spontaneity must be coördinated; irrelevancy produces nothing, is insanity. It is not my uniqueness which makes me of value to the whole but my power of relating. The nut and the screw form a perfect combination not because they are different, but because they exactly fit into each other and together can perform a function which neither could perform alone, or which neither could perform half of alone or any part of alone. It is not that the significance of the nut and screw is increased by their coming together, they have no significance at all unless they do come together. The fact that they have to be different to enter into any fruitful relation with each other is a matter of derivative importance—derived from the work they do.