Another illustration is that of the specialist. It is not a knowledge of his specialty which makes an expert of service to society, but his insight into the relation of his specialty to the whole. Thus it implies not less but more relation, because the entire value of that specialization is that it is part of something. Instead of isolating him and giving him a narrower life, it gives him at once a broader life because it binds him more irrevocably to the whole. But the whole works both ways: the specialist not only contributes to the whole, but all his relations to the whole are embodied in his own particular work.
Thus difference is only a part of the life process. To exaggerate this part led to the excessive and arrogant individualism of the nineteenth century. It behooves us children of the twentieth century to search diligently after the law of unity that we may effectively marshal and range under its dominating sway all the varying diversities of life.
Our definition of individuality must now be “finding my place in the whole”: “my place” gives you the individual, “the whole” gives you society, but by connecting them, by saying “my place in the whole,” we get a fruitful synthesis. I have tried hard to get away from any mechanical system and yet it is difficult to find words which do not seem to bind. I am now afraid of this expression—my place in the whole. It has a rigid, unyielding sound, as if I were a cog in a machine. But my place is not a definite portion of space and time. The people who believe in their “place” in this sense can always photograph their “places.” But my place is a matter of infinite relation, and of infinitely changing relation, so that it can never be captured. It is neither the anarchy of particularism nor the rigidity of the German machine. To know my place is not to know my niche, not to know whether I am cog no. 3 or cog no. 4; it is to be alive at every instant at every finger tip to every contact and to be conscious of those contacts.
We see now that the individual both seeks the whole and is the whole.
First, the individual, biology tells us, is never complete, completeness spells death; social psychology is beginning to show us that man advances towards completeness not by further aggregations to himself, but by further and further relatings of self to other men. We are always reaching forth for union; most, perhaps all, our desires have this motive. The spirit craves totality, this is the motor of social progress; the process of getting it is not by adding more and more to ourselves, but by offering more and more of ourselves. Not appropriation but contribution is the law of growth. What our special contribution is, it is for us to discover. More and more to release the potentialities of the individual means the more and more progressive organization of society if at the same time we are learning how to coördinate all the variations. The individual in wishing for more wholeness does not ask for a chaotic mass, but for the orderly wholeness which we call unity. The test of our vitality is our power of synthesis, of life synthesis.
But although we say that the individual is never complete, it is also true that the individual is a being who, because his function is relating and his relatings are infinite, is in himself the whole of society. It is not that the whole is divided up into pieces; the individual is the whole at one point. This is the incarnation: it is the whole flowing into me, transfusing, suffusing me. The fulness, bigness of my life is not measured by the amount I do, nor the number of people I meet, but how far the whole is expressed through me. This is the reason why unifying gives me a sense of life and more unifying gives me a sense of more life—there is more of the whole and of me. My worth to society is not how valuable a part I am. I am not unique in the world because I am different from any one else, but because I am a whole seen from a special point of view.[[22]]
That the relation of each to the whole is dynamic and not static is perhaps the most profound truth which recent years have brought us.[[23]] We now see that when I give my share I give always far more than my share, such are the infinite complexities, the fulness and fruitfulness of the interrelatings. I contribute to society my mite, and then society contains not just that much more nourishment, but as much more as the loaves and fishes which fed the multitude outnumbered the original seven and two. My contribution meets some particular need not because it can be measured off against that need, but because my contribution by means of all the cross currents of life always has so much more than itself to offer. When I withhold my contribution, therefore, I am withholding far more than my personal share. When I fail some one or some cause, I have not failed just that person, just that cause, but the whole world is thereby crippled. This thought gives an added solemnity to the sense of personal responsibility.
To sum up: individuality is a matter primarily neither of apartness nor of difference, but of each finding his own activity in the whole. In the many times a day that we think of ourselves it is not one time in a thousand that we think of our eccentricities, we are thinking indirectly of those qualities which join us to others: we think of the work we are doing with others and what is expected of us, the people we are going to play with when work is over and the part we are going to take in that play, the committee meeting we are going to attend and what we are going to do there. Every distinct act of the ego is an affirmation of that amount of separateness which makes for perfect union. Every affirmation of the ego establishes my relation with all the rest of the universe. It is one and the same act which establishes my individuality and gives me my place in society. Thus an individual is one who is being created by society, whose daily breath is drawn from society, whose life is spent for society. When we recognize society as self-unfolding, self-unifying activity, we shall hold ourselves open to its influence, letting the Light stream into us, not from an outside source, but from the whole of which we are a living part. It is eternally due us that that whole should feed and nourish and sustain us at every moment, but it cannot do this unless at every moment we are creating it. This perfect interplay is Life. To speak of the “limitations of the individual” is blasphemy and suicide. The spirit of the whole is incarnate in every part. “For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate”—the individual from society.