Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic

by Sidney Lewis Gulick

The "character" of a people (psychic group) consists of its more or less unconscious, because structuralized or incarnate, ideas, emotions, and volitions. Chief among them are those concerning the character of God, the nature and value of man and woman, the necessary relation of character to destiny, the nature and meaning of life and death, and the nature and the authority of moral law. In proportion as the social order incorporates high or low views on these vital subjects, is the character of the people elevated and strong, or debased and weak.

The destiny of a people, and the rôle it plays in history, are determined not by chance nor yet by environment, but in the last analysis by its own character. Yet this character is not something given it complete at the start, an intrinsic psychical inheritance, nor is it dependent for transmission on biological heredity, passing only from parents to offspring. Character belongs to the sphere of social psychic life and is the subject of social heredity. Through social intercourse the moral character dominating a psychic group may be transmitted to members of an alien psychic group. This usually takes place through missionary activity. The moral character of a psychic group may in this way be fundamentally transformed, and with character, destiny.

Floating ideas, not yet woven into the warp and woof of life, not yet incarnate in the individual or in the social order, have little influence on the character of the individual or the group, however beautiful, true, or elevating such ideas may be in themselves. The character of a people is to be judged, therefore, not by the beauty or elevation of every idea that may be found in its literature, but only by those ideas that have been assimilated, that have become incorporated into the social order. These determine a people's character and destiny. According as these ideas persist in the social order, is its character permanent.

Progress consists of expanding life, communal and individual, extensive and intensive, physical and psychical. True progress is balanced. High communal development, that is, highly organized society, is impossible without the wide attainment of highly developed individuals. Progressive mastery of nature likewise is impossible apart from growing psychic development in all its branches, emotional, intellectual and volitional, communal and individual.

Historically, communalism is the first principle to emerge in consciousness. To succeed, however, it must be accompanied by at least a certain degree of individualism, even though it be quite implicit. The full development of the communal principle is impossible apart from the correspondingly full development of the individual principle. These are complementary principles of progress. Each alone is impossible. In proportion as either is emphasized at the expense of the other, is progress impeded. Arrested civilizations are due to the disproportionate and excessive development of one or the other of these principles.

Personality, expressing and realizing itself in communal and individual life, in objective and subjective forms, is at once the cause and the goal of progress. Social and psychic evolution are, therefore, in the last analysis, personal processes. The irreducible and final factor in social evolution and in social science is personality; for personality is the determinative factor of a human being.

Progress in personal development consists of increasing extent and accuracy of knowledge, refinement and elevation of emotions, and nobility and reliability of volitions. Progress in personal development requires the individual to pass from objective heterocratic to subjective autocratic or self-regulative ethical life. He must pass from the traditional to the enlightened, from the communal to the individualistic stage in ethics and religion. He must feel with increasing force the binding nature of the supra-communal sanctions for communal and individual life, accepting the highest dictates of the enlightened moral consciousness as the laws of the universe. But this means that the individual must secure increasing insight into the immutable and eternal laws of spiritual being and must identify his personal interests, his very self with those laws, with the Heart of the. Universe, with God himself. Only so will he become completely autonomous, self-regulative. Only thus will the individual become and remain an altruistic communo-individual, fitted to meet and survive the relaxation of the historic communal and supra-communal sanctions for communal and individual life, a relaxation induced by growing political liberty and growing intellectual rejection of primitive or defective religious beliefs.

Progress in personality is thus at bottom an ethico-religious process. The wide attainment of developed personality permits the formation of enlarging highly organized psychic groups, accompanied by increasing specialization of its individual members. This communal expansion, ramifying organization and individual specialization, secures increasing extensive and intensive intellectual understanding of the universe, and this in turn active mastery of nature, with all the consequences of growing ease and richness of life.

Ethico-religious, autonomous personality is thus the tap-root of highly developed and permanently progressive civilizations. Personality is, therefore, the criterion of progress. Mere ease of physical life, freedom from anxiety, light-hearted, care-free happiness, mastery of nature, material civilization, highly developed art, literature, and music, or even refined culture, are partial and inadequate, if not positively false, criteria.

Personality, as a nature, is an inherent psychic heritage shared by all human beings. It is transmitted only from parents to offspring, and its transmission depends only on that relation. Personality, as a varying psychic characteristic, is a matter of social inheritance, and is profoundly dependent, therefore, on the nature of the social order and the social evolution.