New surges of life are pounding at circumference and centre; we must open the way for their entrance and onflow. To-day the individual is submerged, smothered, choked by the crowd fallacy, the herd theory. Free him from these, release his energies, and he with all other Freemen will work out quick, flexible, constantly changing forms which shall respond sensitively to every need.
Under our present system, social and economic changes necessary because of changing social and economic conditions cannot be brought about. The first reform needed in our political practice is to find some method by which the government shall continuously represent the people. No state can endure unless the political bond is being forever forged anew. The organization of men in small local groups gives opportunity for this continuous political activity which ceaselessly creates the state. Our government forms cannot be fossils from a dead age, but must be sensitive, mobile channels for the quick and quickening soul of the individual to flow to those larger confluences which finally bring forth the state. Thus every man is the state at every moment, whether in daily toil or social intercourse, and thus the state itself, leading a myriad-membered life, is expressing itself as truly in its humblest citizen as in its supreme assembly.
The principle of modern politics, the principle of creative citizenship, must predominantly and preëminently body itself and be acknowledged by every human being. Then will “practical politics” be for the first time practical.
A few words of explanation seem necessary. I have no bibliography simply because any list of references which I could give would necessarily be a partial one since much of this book has come by wireless. Besides all that is being written definitely of a new state, the air to-day is full of the tentative, the partial, the fragmentary thought, the isolated flash of insight from some genius, all of which is being turned to the solution of those problems which, from our waking to our sleeping, face us with their urgent demand. I am here trying to show the need of a wide and systematic study of these problems, not pretending to be able to solve them. Much interweaving of thought will be necessary before the form of the new state appears to us.
Moreover, I have not traced the strands of thought which have led us to our present ideas. That does not mean that I do not recognize the slow building up of these ideas or all our indebtedness to the thinkers of the past. I speak of principles as “new” which we all know were familiar to Aristotle or Kant and are new to-day only in their application.
The word new is so much used in the present day—New Freedom, New Democracy, New Society etc.—that it is perhaps well for us to remind ourselves what we mean by this word. We are using the word new partly in reaction to the selfishness of the nineteenth century, in reaction to a world which has culminated in this war, but more especially in the sense of the live, the real, in contrast to the inert, the dead. It is not a time distinction—the “new” (the vital) claims fellowship with all that is “new” (vital) in the past. When we speak of the “New” Freedom we mean all the reality and truth which have accumulated in all the conceptions of freedom up to the present moment. The “New” Society is the “Perfect Society.” The “New” Life is the Vita Nuova, “when spring came to the heart of Italy.”
It is I hope unnecessary to explain that in my frequent use of the term “the new psychology,” I am not referring to any definitely formulated body of thought; there are no writers who are expounding the new psychology as such. By the “new psychology” I mean something now in the making: I mean partly that group psychology which is receiving more attention and gaining more influence every day, and partly I mean simply that feeling out for a new conception of modes of association which we see in law, economics, ethics, politics, and indeed in every department of thought. It is a short way of saying that we are now looking at things not as entities but in relation. When our modern jurists speak of the growing emphasis upon relation rather than upon contract—they are speaking of the “new psychology.”
There is, however, another and very important aspect of contemporary psychology closely connected with this one of relation. We are to-day seeking to understand the sources of human motives,[[1]] and then to free their channels so that these elemental springs of human activity (the fundamental instincts of man) shall not be dammed but flow forth in normal fashion, for normal man is constructive. A few years ago, for instance, we were satisfied merely to condemn sabotage and repudiation of law; now we are trying to discover the cause of this deviation from the normal in order to see if it can be removed. This necessity for the understanding of the nature and vital needs of men has not yet reached full self-consciousness, but appears in diverse forms: as the investigation of the I. W. W., as a study of “Human Nature in Politics,” an examination of “The Great Society,” as child-study, as Y. M. C. A. efforts to nourish all sides of men at the front, etc. etc. To-day the new psychology speaks in many voices. Soon we may hope for some unified formulation of all this varied and scattered utterance. Soon we may hope also that the connection will be made between this aspect of contemporary psychology and the group psychology upon which this book is mainly founded.
I wish to add my reason for giving quotations from many writers whose names I have not cited. This has been chiefly because often the sentence or phrase quoted taken away from all context does not give a fair idea of the writer’s complete thought, and I have used it not in an attempt to refute these writers, but merely as illustrating certain tendencies to which we are all more or less subject at present. Many of the writers with whom I have disagreed in some particular have been in the main my teachers and guides.