The Will to Doubt Part 5

Contradiction, then, is difference so wide that unity seems wholly betrayed rather than served or maintained. A real unity, however, requires for its realization just the freedom from material form or ground which such extreme difference would force upon it. It therefore gains instead of losing reality by pa.s.sing into the world of the materially and visibly empty and abstract, or, say, by leaving behind any hope of a finite residence and entering the sphere of the infinite, to which difference, or at least contradiction, so cordially invites--or expels--it. And, this being true, we can see how unity is served or maintained, as was said, by the contradictions of experience.

Commonly men have an idea that differences mean, or point to, unity, but they are more likely to suppose that the unity is by mere contrast or ant.i.thesis than [p.139] clearly to recognize that it is a most intimate fact of the differences themselves. They will even see in a number of things only so many varying aspects of some one thing, and will go so far as to look upon the aspects as actually enriching and deepening the unity, but they still fail fully to appreciate how the real unity is immanent and immediate in the differences. Again, in all their thinking they contrast, and may consciously observe that they contrast, only objects or people that really have something in common, comparing, on the other hand, only such as in some way are manifestly different, and in their practical affairs they compete only with those who with them are parties to one and the same life, a fundamental sympathy, indeed, being a necessary condition of their rivalry, and actually and actively hate only the beings whom because of a common humanity they might love; but here, too, their appreciation lags behind the fact.

In life generally, moreover, in small things and in large, extremes do have the habit of meeting. A man's virtues are so near to his vices. The widest variations in things are only relatively at variance. Even what is cold is somewhat warm. Nothing is absolutely anything. In history a single ideal, rising to influence, has always divided men into two opposing camps. Witness the fact of bipartisans.h.i.+p, not in politics alone, but in all of life's interests. Democrats and Republicans, Radicals and Conservatives alike have loved their country and honoured their country's flag and, regardless of party, their country's heroes or patriots. Epicureans and Stoics--in recent times or long ago--have found the same life worth living. The [p.140] Roman Law and the Roman Holiday, working together, like the right and the left hand, different yet in sympathy, made the great empire. Two men, furthermore, in active, open conflict are in truth at serious difference with each other; but, as they might even say, if their conflict were in the form of a debate, where words instead of fists or pistols were the weapons, in the bare, unapplied principle involved, or say in the abstract, in the final success of whichever is the "best man," they do and they must agree.

Simply throughout this life of ours there has been and there can be no idealism without conflict and no conflict, whatever the issue or the manner, without common weapons, which means, too, without some common relations.h.i.+p and some common interest. As for the idealism, too, what is it but a demand for real unity? And the common weapons, or for quite general purposes, the common forms in which a conflict or an opposition is expressed, as if the hiding-place of unity, perhaps a sleeping unity, only indicate in the very differences a basis, a potential of agreement, even an earnest of an underlying and sometimes awakening accord. So, truly, in life at large extremes do meet. But commonly men recognize at most only that they meet, without realizing that their difference is intrinsic to a real unity.

Where unity is real, then, there must be infinite difference, and infinite difference is just what the contradictions of experience impose upon experience and make it responsible to. Infinite difference gives to everything an opposite and to all things unity; to every man a rival and to human society, as a whole, solidarity. Against the material it sets the spiritual; against [p.141] the particular, the general; against the subjective, the objective; against the living, the dead; against the lawful, the lawless; against the caused, the uncaused; and to all these, the spiritual and the material, the subjective and the objective, the living and the dead, the lawful and the lawless, the caused and the uncaused, it gives place in a perfect unity; not, of course, in any material unity, since such unity could not be perfect, but nevertheless in a real unity.

For our first step, therefore, in the ascent of that "impossible subtlety," contradiction is only difference at its greatest limit; for the second, difference in general, whether partial or extreme, marks an underlying, or more precisely an indwelling unity; and for the last step, real unity is served, not betrayed by difference. Moreover, the wider the difference, the nearer it be to positive contradiction or opposition, the more conclusive and effective is the service. Remember, real unity can never take sides; in the world of things it must be always both-sided. It cannot be here or there, now and then--be the then in the past or in the future, this or that. In the words, used of truth, perhaps an appropriate refrain for this book, it can have neither visible form nor body, neither habitation nor name; like the Son of Man, it cannot have where to lay its head. The particular opposition of life and death affords a peculiarly serviceable ill.u.s.tration, for it is, of course, at the bottom of many of the most searching paradoxes of our human experience. Real life cannot be confined to any single organic form or to any single group of organic forms. In fact, it cannot be bound even to the organic as commonly distinguished from the [p.142]

inorganic world. So for the biologist, very much as for the theologian, whenever life takes a residence, death must ensue sooner or later. Life and death, then, as opposites, become the medium of real life. But not only have we here a helpful ill.u.s.tration, also we have a suggestion that should prevent an easy misunderstanding. In general, as so plainly in this special case, the opposition, so necessary to reality in experience, to a real life or to any real unity, can itself be complete and effective, not through any single instance of extreme difference, not through the opposition of just two distinct things, but only through an acc.u.mulation or summation of all possible instances, so to speak, from difference at zero to difference at infinity. In fact, a real opposition or rather a truly infinite difference, could be only in such a sum. Not the single climax of death, but the constant dying, to which it is only a climax, is what makes real the opposition of life and death and makes this the medium, as was said, of the real life. Death must constantly condition all the movements and processes of life: it must have all possible degrees. And, in like manner, extreme difference at large, just to be real itself and to make for real unity, must be in and through all possible degrees of difference. In other words, the perfect opposition, or contradiction, upon which reality depends, like the perfect death, is rather a continuum than the wide gap, or chasm, which so many have thought it; it is a graduate difference, not a single cataclysmic difference. Difference in gradation or degree, I have sometimes heard it said, is not real difference; but this statement, though by no means without warrant or meaning, is [p.143] misleading.

Surely a cataclysmic difference, a "difference in kind," can be only one finite case of difference; the negative, or opposition, in it can be only relative; whereas, when in degree, difference becomes necessarily infinite. Accordingly, as we must not forget, from this point on through the remainder of this book, the contradiction of which we have been thinking and which we have found infecting experience at every turn, is not, what at first and even second thought it may have seemed, just an opposition of two things; between its lines, as it were, it is inclusive of, or maintained by, all the manifold and various things in life and consciousness; it is the completed, short-circuited sum of an infinite series. An infinitely many-sided world is the only world that can claim real unity, and a world of such real unity is the world to which the habit of contradiction, which we have observed, relates our human experience.

So far, then, in estimating the possible value of this central and essential defect of experience, we have found that it implies action and that it makes for, or testifies to, real unity. Now, thirdly, perhaps only to enlarge upon what has just been said, contradiction is an absolutely effective correction of narrowness or partiality or relativity or one-sidedness in life or consciousness, and so it makes experience not abstract, but realistic. This is in truth only another view of the worth of contradiction to integrity and vitality, to unity and reality, but it would emphasize, what is very interesting at least to the metaphysician, and cannot fail to be of some interest to the moralist and the theologian, that where there is real unity there [p.144] is also true reality. Only the One is. The One and Being are the same. There can be but one substance, as also but one G.o.d. So men have said in effect throughout the ages, and where they have conceded reality or substantial character to manifoldness, the concession has simply concealed a rea.s.sertion, but with fuller and deeper meaning, of the intimacy of unity with reality. What makes for real unity or wholeness, then, must impart realistic character, giving actual contact and intimacy with just that of which, so to speak, the world is made. Now individual things or ideas always show life suffering in some measure under tangential digressions from the circle of its real wholeness, and only opposition can save them or can preserve the reality to which they both belong and contribute. Has not Emerson, among many others, declared with a cogency and a depth of meaning which quite defy the superficiality and levity attractive to a few, that mere consistency is narrow and confining? Any particular view-point or idea or ideal, any particular thing or activity, simply needs an opposite to balance the abstraction or digression which being particular must always involve.

Particularity, specific individuality, is certainly a necessary condition of real worth in life, but with an equal necessity there could be no life, no conservation and wholeness of life if the particular, individual things stood unchallenged in the world, and no realistic experience, if experience were not thus paradoxical and divided against itself. Life, therefore, gets not only movement and unity from the contradictions that lie at the very heart of experience, but in getting unity it gets also contact [p.145] with reality, and the three together may be summed up in the one word poise. Montaigne marvelled at the hopeless folly of mankind as compared with the wisdom of G.o.d, but man's folly is divided against itself and so imbued with G.o.d's wisdom; and with countless others he saw the ideas of man to be only subjective and unsubstantial and irresponsible, but man's ideas, though fanciful and illusory, though subjective and imaginative, work against each other for what is real and substantial. Man's ideas co-operate for their own correction and so for communion or intimacy with a character that is not less substantial or responsible than that of G.o.d himself.

And so, fourthly, the contradictions of experience make experience supremely practical. They make it practical just because they make realistic, or substantial, an experience which without them would be abstract and only relative and "phenomenal." Possibly this is the hardest thing of all to apprehend, or at least to express satisfactorily. Yet the fact, to which I keep returning, that only the both-sided in everyday matters or in science or in any form of positive experience can accord with reality and its wholeness, is a.s.suredly quite to the point. In practical life there always are, and emphatically there always must be, two sides, to every thing, to every question. In practical life, too, or at any rate in all effective activity, there always is, and emphatically there always must be, something very like to leaders.h.i.+p; but any truly practical leaders.h.i.+p, any leaders.h.i.+p that is all along the lines of life, be it of things, ideas, persons, or social cla.s.ses or parties, can never be confined to a [p.146] single individual representative, but must be instead a leaders.h.i.+p of many. No thoroughly practical leaders.h.i.+p, I say, can ever be on one side or the other, but instead of being one-sided it must be both-sided, or rather, infinitely many-sided; it must be between or among all the different and opposed individuals; it must lie, perhaps in a sense sleep, in rivalry and compet.i.tion. There can be no visible leader, whose leaders.h.i.+p is wholly practical, whether of things or realities--for the metaphysician--or of ideas or categories--for the logician--or of persons or cla.s.ses--for the statesman or the moralist or the theologian. Metaphysical reality, the truly practical and realistic knowledge, the political supremacy which is complete and inclusive, or the wholly moral life or the divine life must forever be secured, not through a single manifestation presiding over the others, but through the divided labour of them all. Yes, real leaders.h.i.+p, like real unity in general, is a divided labour; it is a labour that effects successful co-operation through its very differences and conflicts: for reality, a labour perhaps of different "elements" or "ent.i.ties"; for knowledge, of different ideas and standpoints; for morals, of different standards; for politics, of different parties and platforms; for divinity, of different G.o.ds; and for life at large, a labour of infinite differences, which means also a labour of opposites, that at once develop and correct each other to the glory of that which is real and practical.

It would be peculiarly interesting to examine further this principle of a practical, truly realistic experience ensured to human life through the inner [p.147] conflicts of experience. The history of morals and ethics, for example, notably of the perennial conflict between hedonism and idealism, could not but cast a good deal of light upon it; and the history of political struggles, or the history of the great controversies in science--such as that between vitalism and anti-vitalism or that between atomism and energism; or in philosophy, between dualism and monism; or in theology, between naturalism and supernaturalism, would also be most illuminating; while, also perhaps appealing only to the few, in the logic of the negative, as it has developed from the earliest times, or in psychological theory--for example, in the dispute of the advocates of the innervation theory and the afferent theory, or in Hering's theory of vision, or, again, in the life and movement of any one of the time-worn paradoxes of popular or scientific or philosophical ideas, one might expect to find suggestive ill.u.s.tration. In philosophy, Anaximander, Herac.l.i.tus, Zeno, Socrates, Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel have all found negation, or contradiction, necessary to any adequate account of reality. Explorations, however, in their teachings or along any of the paths that were suggested, would lead us too far astray.

Fifthly, then, not only do the contradictions make experience realistic and so practical, but also they make it essentially social. A life or an experience that is contradictory has (1) movement, (2) unity or integrity, (3) reality and poise, and (4) practicality; and then it has besides, as if the medium through which these four things are sustained, (5) social character, society being only the visible expression, the [p.148] outer realization, of the both-sidedness, of the infinitely differential unity or the divided labour, which an active, yet thoroughly self-controlled, truly realistic, practical experience requires. In a former chapter, it will be readily recalled, an impulse to social life was found to be intimately connected with the att.i.tude of doubt, and here clearly we are confronted with only another view of the same fact, since contradiction has become our most cogent reason for doubt and is now seen to require the social relations. An individual whose experience is ever divided against itself is, _ipso facto_, a social character, his social environment, whether in its narrowest or broadest manifestation, adding nothing to his nature or to the struggles of that nature, but only making the division against himself constantly and manifestly real. The social environment, as it were, just proves the man, his struggle and all, to himself. Some have agreed that the individual consciousness contained nothing on which to ground a positive case for society, for direct positive social interest; but so long as man's experience is necessarily paradoxical or contradictory, so long as man is divided against himself, or as the labour of life and reality is a divided labour, the case for society and for personal interest in society is clear and conclusive. A basis for society lies in the very nature of experience. Society is not something added to individuality from without.

Let us here beware of easy sentiment. Let not our thinking conjure false sweetness and light. Experience is truly and essentially social; the individual was not meant to dwell alone; but herein is no immediate [p.149] cure-all, no promise of an unperturbed brotherly love, of a life for one and all of simple peace and blissful quietude. On such a plan society would hardly suit the individual with whom, and with whose natural experience, we have become acquainted. To speak with the extravagance of a counter-sentimentalism, the individual of our present acquaintance is forever spoiling for a fight. In the life of the society to which he belongs; in the life where he watches for his incoming s.h.i.+p, there must always be hate and evil in all their forms, lawlessness and destruction, illusion and error; but--and just here sentiment, the sentiment of a really searching optimism, called once before a sacrificial and heroic optimism, may find some a.s.surance--never an unmixed hate, never a wholly idle destruction, never an unmeaning error.

Can anything, indeed, that has another thing against it--that has, in short, an opposite--ever be itself unmixed? The good or the evil in society, being always opposed, is always also shared. So few people recognize, or appreciate, what a great mixer opposition is. Death is the pa.s.sing only of inadequate or unworthy life. Hate witnesses only a false love; sin, a pharisaical righteousness. Destruction marks an imperfect construction. And in all its forms, evil is not so much something in and by itself as an exposure and reproach of what is supposed to be unmixedly good. Public crime, for example, is not so local as it appears; it is only a generally, widely private vice made locally manifest, and the respectable and law-abiding, who adjudge it evil, are bound to feel as if adjudging and condemning themselves. In a word, the individual's natural society [p.149] is never without evil, but in all its forms the evil has somewhat of good in it; and although social life, not less than individual life, must be one of conflict and discord, nevertheless, because the various factors or factions, however opposed, can never be unmixed, because the members of society must all be good and bad, right and wrong--I almost said living and dead together--instead of being hopeless for having evil in it, the life of society is so much the more worth living. Shallow sentimentalism may not so esteem it, but we need give little thought to shallow sentimentalism.

So our use of the word "society" is not sentimental. Society means conflict. It is just the natural sphere of life and reality as for ever a divided labour, as for ever divided and laborious--divided even between the powers for supposed good and for adjudged evil, and through the conflicts, in which the division is expressed, what is true and good and vital is being forever kept real. Or, to repeat, society is the natural medium through which movement, unity or integrity, poise and reality, and practicality are secured and realized in human experience; it is that which makes the individual's division against himself manifestly real and positively and progressively effective for a life, yes, for his life, at once of vitality and perfect wholeness.

But now that the five things are said, now that the contradictions of experience have been seen to serve experience by giving it movement, unity, poise, practical reality and social character, somebody is sure to remark facetiously that on the evidence contradiction is something we should all cultivate a.s.siduously, and [p.151] that henceforth to face both ways, the b.u.t.t of so much opprobrium, should be one of man's greatest ideals; in brief, that the inconsistent creatures in politics, morals, and theology are the coming examples for mankind. Verily the devil has been given his promised "character." But, alas! in the spirit of such startling humour one would have to conclude also that because crime has beyond all question been a means of social development, being all-important to the awakening of the social consciousness and conscience, all men should at once take thought and find it their duty to turn criminals; or, again, that because death has a fundamental part in the order of nature and is, moreover, of greatest spiritual worth and significance, we should all morbidly seek it, being successfully righteous only by being suicides. True, we do need to recognize the positive function of crime in the progress of civilization, or in the history of law, and also to be aware of crime as a possibility in our own lives, and we need to be ready to die and to feel besides that dying we are far from losing all that is worth having, but to court crime or to seek death would certainly be to deprive either of the very worth which has made it significant. And in much the same way we may very profitably recognize contradiction or controversy, whether personal or social, as a necessary condition of all valid experience, but not on that account are we to cultivate what is contradictory, to be always blindly spoiling for a contradiction. Like crime or death, if directly courted, contradiction would lose its peculiar effectiveness. The both-sidedness or the all-sidedness, which at once develops and conserves human life, is only [p.152] that which is maintained with a tenacious, even with a would-be consistent loyalty to each and every side.

So, although grossly misused if directly courted, this defect of experience has its place, even its ideal value, in experience, and what on the surface seemed an almost if not quite hopeless reason for doubt, has truly become all but transfigured, seeming now a source of real a.s.surance. With Herac.l.i.tus of old, only perhaps seeing even more than he saw, we can glory in a world of strife. Doubting all things, we can yet believe that all things work together for what is real, for what is good.

But let me now put the result, so far secured, of our confession of doubt in a new way. For a life in which every thing has an opposite, every idea a counter-idea, truth very plainly, as has indeed been frequently said, cannot be a specific consciousness nor reality a fixed thing. Truth is not a creed, but a spirit. Reality is not a thing, but a life. And for being a spirit truth is only the more realistic? For being a life, reality is only the more substantial. Perfection, too, even the Perfect One, with whom we a.s.sociate the true and the real, is no particular separate being in a certain established exclusive status, at once infinitely and pa.s.sively excellent, but a power ever dwelling in the strife that makes for movement and poise. For being such a power, too, he is only more surely perfect, only more certainly infinite and excellent.

Such terms as spirit, life, and power are confessedly somewhat dangerous terms to use. Especially the first is liable to misunderstanding. Yet, whatever [p.153] common usage may be, when I say that truth is not a creed but a spirit, that reality is not a thing but a power, the reference is directly to that agent or principle of validity which has been found to hold our experience, naturally so faulty, to contact and intimacy with the real world. A spirit of truth, a principle of validity there is, to which the very faults of experience give witness, and in view of this we who doubt, who doubt the particular things, the creeds and the objects generally, the definite forms and ideas, the habits and standpoints of our everyday life or our scientific theory, may yet believe; we may believe in the real spirit, or power, which makes all things parties to the divided labour of a real life.[2]

[1] This limitation is shown, for example, in the logical principle of ident.i.ty.

[2] The worth a.s.signed in this chapter to the contradictions of experience involves a standpoint which apparently is at variance with that of Mr. F.H. Bradley, whose book, _Appearance and Reality_, has occupied such an important place in the philosophical study and controversy of the last ten years. Of course, here is not the place for final criticism of Mr. Bradley, since the present examination of doubt is no such scrutiny of experience as his; it is far short of what would make a complete philosophical argument. Nevertheless, a word or two expressing the nature of the difference between his view and the view advocated here can hardly be impertinent. Thus, if I read him rightly, Mr. Bradley has argued from the paradoxes of experience to the complete, hopeless phenomenality of experience, while in this study of doubt the argument has been from the paradoxes of experience to a thoroughly realistic experience. Again, Mr. Bradley's Absolute is able to include the phenomenal, the relative and contradictory, only because this is so unsubstantial as to offer no resistance, while here there has not even been any question of inclusion. _All experience_, our position has been, _is informed with reality; its very contradictions hold an otherwise phenomenal, relative, changing experience close down to a real world_; and this position, I repeat, is at variance with what Mr. Bradley has _seemed_ to say. See, however, a short article, "Relativity and Reality," in the _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods_, Vol. I, No. 24, November, 1904.

[p.154]

VII.

THE PERSONAL AND THE SOCIAL, THE VITAL AND THE FORMAL IN EXPERIENCE.

Contrasts such as those in the t.i.tle of the present chapter, the personal and the social, the vital and the formal, or instrumental, are always dangerous to clear thinking, and yet in spite of the danger no thinking can avoid them. They can be only relatively true; the terms in which they are couched cannot fail, sooner or later, from one standpoint or another, to make an exchange of the very things to which they apply, since opposition, as must be remembered, is always a most effective mixer, and therefore they can only punctuate the naturally chiaroscuro character that belongs to all articulate thinking. Nevertheless, used with self-control, they are distinctly serviceable.

In our recent dismission of the value of the essential defects of experience, and particularly when we came to a.s.sociate social character with the habit of contradiction, a contrast of the personal and the social was very plainly implied, and some special attention to this contrast, I feel sure, will help us to comprehend more fully what was said at the time, and will be of great advantage also to our general purpose. It was [p.155] said that society was nothing alien, or additional, to the nature of the individual, that a basis for society lay in the very nature of experience, that so long as man was divided against himself and the labour of life and reality was necessarily a divided labour, the case both for society and for personal interest in society was clear and conclusive; but this was not fully to define the parts that are played by the individual person and the social group in the development and maintenance of human life. Some, for example, would fear more for the safety of the individual or the person than for that of society; and just in recognition of their fear, we honest doubters, who are now also at least potential believers, must look to our defences.

Long ago Plato drew an a.n.a.logy of the soul or self, of the human individual, to society, and so, too, Aristotle, though not to society, but much more broadly to all nature, and the one a.n.a.logy or the other has had a good deal of fascination, not to say intellectual inspiration, for thinking men ever since. Yet, so far as I am aware, at least one of the implications of the idea has never been fully stated or appraised, and this is much to be wondered at, since there is involved a strong case for both the personal and the social in the maintenance of experience.[1]

Plato found reason, will, and sensuous nature in the individual and a.n.a.logously a thinking or law-making cla.s.s, an official or military cla.s.s, and an industrial or [p.156] appet.i.tive cla.s.s in society; and Aristotle, in very much the same way, found the parts of the individual soul a.n.a.logous to the vegetable, animal, and rational kingdoms of nature, and either of these a.n.a.logies is simple enough and reasonable enough to be formally understood, if not at once wholly appreciated, with its mere statement. Still, in order to be sure of appreciation, in order especially to get the reflected light on the relation between individual and society, we must look to the facts and conditions which are presented very closely.

To begin with, such an a.n.a.logy, dealing as it does with the relation of a part to the whole, has and should have, for a reason not hard to find, the freedom of the city of logic. Other than logical approval of it might be cited. Biology and sociology and psychology might be called in to give testimony. And out of the past, the more recent past at least as known to the historian of philosophy, Leibnitz with his _lex a.n.a.logiae_, or for that matter with the general import of his monadology, might be appealed to. But without tarrying for a.s.sistance from these quarters, highly respectable though they are, I make a simple, yet perhaps timely and--with apologies for so much emotion--soul-satisfying reference to the logic in the case, for after all biology and sociology and psychology are always under the restraints of logic, as well as alliterated with it; nor does the evidence of logic depend on mere technical acquaintance with given sets of facts. Thus, in these enlightened days, to say nothing of Plato's time or Aristotle's, how can the true part of anything ever dare [p.157] not to have an a.n.a.logy, even a "part-for-part" or "one-to-one" correspondence to the whole in which it is comprised? And--this being, as in due time will appear, quite as important--how can a whole, be it society or nature or anything else, ever have parts without having also, actually or potentially, parts within its parts? In fact, given any divided whole, and the division, however far it may be carried, will always involve at least these three typical factors: (1) The individual as the part still undivided, though at the same time necessarily inwardly alive with the self-same differential operation to which it has owed its origin; (2) the group-part or cla.s.s, which for the convenience of the adjective form may be known also as the faction, and which was so important to Plato in his a.n.a.logy of the individual to a cla.s.s-divided society; and (3) the all-inclusive whole. And among these factors in all possible ways--that is, even between individual and individual, or individual and group or group and group, as well as between either individual or group and whole--an a.n.a.logy in terms of all the various elements of the original differential operation will persist. Such, almost truistically, though also perhaps somewhat subtly for ordinary purposes, is the logical condition of division or differentiation. Difference, like its limit opposition, is thus a great mixer, and division can be no mere separation or isolation of parts. The saying comes to my mind from somewhere, that though division may reveal distinct vertebrae, the vertebra always conceal a spinal cord.

a.n.a.logy, however, although thus universal, although [p.158] applicable, as said, in all of the possible ways, must itself share in, must be quite under the spell of, the differentiation; it must have as many various forms as it has expressions. In every expression the relation must indeed be one of a.n.a.logy, but it can never be of the same order or degree. That of the individual to the group or faction must be qualitatively distinct from all others, say from that of the individual either to another individual or to the all-inclusive whole. Nor can the much used and frequently abused distinction between small and large writings, as when history is taken as a large writing of personal biography or a social inst.i.tution of some special phase of personal character, adequately represent the differentiation here in mind.

Consider how various, internally and externally, are all the terms among which the a.n.a.logies obtain. Thus, as of direct interest here, factional differences are bound to be sharper or wider, they are inevitably more deeply set and more openly exclusive of each other than individual differences, and in consequence the faction is, not indeed absolutely, but characteristically special or particularistic. Perhaps because of its intermediate position between the individual, which is the whole implicitly and potentially, and the completely inclusive environment, which is the whole actually and definitely or explicitly, it is, so to speak, significantly only one among many, instead of being, as in the case of each of the extremes, many in one. It conspicuously appropriates a particular character, and while not excluding any of the other characters which are incident to its own special production, it includes these on the whole only in a negative way, in [p.159] the way in which opposition includes what opposes it or action the reaction it always implies or in general any different thing the thing or things from which it is different. The extremes, however, as was said, are each "many in one," though in different ways. The individual, being still only potentially divided and being, as it were, the latest residence of the primary operation, is always in some measure directly and positively active with all the different factors of the operation, and this in spite of the restraints of any particular cla.s.s-affiliation, and the whole, though macro-cosmic with respect to the microcosmic individual, is at the same time qualitatively distinct, as distinct at least as the explicit from the implicit, the actual from the potential. Whatever a merely formal logic might say, a real logic requires that at most microcosm and macrocosm are only metaphors of each other. Even their difference of size would be quite enough to differentiate them at least as sharply as the difference of size differentiated imperial Rome from her prototype the Greek City-State. Can the whole and the part be one or many or many in one, can they be real or alive or conscious, can they be material, can they be personal, can they be anything whatsoever in qualitatively the same way? Men have often seemed to think so, but without any good reason. The faction, then, the individual and the whole, are qualitatively different expressions of the elements of the operation that has made them; and their relations, always dependent on a.n.a.logy, must be various accordingly.

But now, to leave these questions of logic and to turn directly to the case for both personality and [p.160] society, no idea can be more immediately useful to us than that of what is often styled the unity of experience. Of course this unity, as it is real, must meet just those tests of reality, or of a real unity, that we have already remarked, but within the limits of a definition the unity of experience is neither more nor less than the totality of human relations. It is the experience-whole comprising all the phases of human nature; in other words, all the actual or possible relations of man to nature in general, or all the manifold states and activities, stages and events, however different, however seemingly contradictory, in human life. A real unity, as we know, being denied local habitation and a name, is necessarily a thoroughly differential unity; and human nature is a.n.a.lyzable in an indefinite number of ways. It is, to ill.u.s.trate, physical, mental, and spiritual, or more elaborately, it is athletic, industrial, political, intellectual, moral, aesthetic, and religious, and in its social life has developed inst.i.tutions answering to these different phases of itself. It is, again, lawful and lawless, old and young, conservative and radical, sympathetic and selfish. But whatever the mode of a.n.a.lysis or division or dichotomy, the unity of experience embraces all the elements, aspects, or relations that are discovered. In a word, even in the language of the simple logic indicated above, the unity of experience is only the all-inclusive whole, but here without regard to any distinction between what is actual or explicit and what is potential or implicit, out of which has sprung the differential operation that has made human society and human history, that has given rise to a manifest [p.161]

social life, to the social cla.s.s or faction and to the individual person.

And the person as the real individual, as the part that is still undivided, and that is therefore in itself quick with the differential operation, is thus the living, integral exponent of the unity of experience. He is, above all, its unformed or untethered vitality. In him every phase or part of what is possible in human nature moves with some power. He is religious, political, industrial; or spiritual, intellectual, and physical; or good and bad, conservative and radical, all in one; and characteristically he is each and all of these without the restraints of such visible forms or rites as now and again may become instrumental to their expression. Hence the familiar idea of the universality, which is identical with the indeterminate character, of any side of human nature; of the political side, for example, or the religious or the physiological, of the lawful or of the lawless. Not any particular political status, nor any particular religion, nor any particular body is universal, but the political or the religious or the physiological is universal--as universal, to repeat, as it is indeterminate. Not any particular lawfulness or lawlessness, but the lawful or the lawless is universal. Personally, just to sum up what has been said, all individuals are all things in one, and this idea, as it is understood, should correct that erroneous treatment of individualism, whether as a movement in the life of society or even as an incident of the scientific method of induction, to which reference was made in the discussion of the rise of science.[2]

[p.162] But the story of personality cannot be told by itself. Whatever the person may be characteristically, he is never that alone, and before any estimate of all that he is or of all that enters into his life can be attained, attention must be turned to society, the other horn of our present interest, and particularly to the social cla.s.s or faction. If the person in his peculiar character is general or all-inclusive with reference to the unity of experience, the factional life is special, particular, or partial; it is one-sided and outwardly exclusive.

Sociologically as well as logically factional differences are, as has been suggested, wider and sharper than individual or personal differences. Personally all men are free, socially approachable, liberal in thought and act; not so factionally. Judged from its cla.s.ses society is even a hot-bed of specialism, its cla.s.ses always tending to become castes, and of hostility, its differences inducing open conflict. An ill.u.s.tration of this we have already seen in the rise of the profession of science.

Whence, to emphasize at once a most important conclusion, the typical relation of the person to the cla.s.s is not, as so often said or implied, that of the particular to the general; instead it is that of the general to the particular, of the whole to the part, and significantly that of the vital to the instrumental. Yet, to say no more than this would be a serious mistake, for at least in two ways this statement must be modified. Doubtless the required modifications are directly consequent upon the nature and origin of the relation, but nevertheless they need to be carefully observed. Thus, logically and sociologically [p.163]

factional differences are not merely wider and deeper; just because more definitely set, they also imply higher development. Factional life may be special, but through the strength that union gives and the power and efficiency that spring from repet.i.tion and imitation, it attains a high degree of skill and insight. Again, factional life, like that of corporations, lacks soul; it tends to become formal and mechanical and in the sense that this indicates it is static. Hence its instrumental character. Between individual and cla.s.s there is a difference very like that between impulse and habit, or organic life and mere physical process, or function and structure, or say human nature in terms of its life-principle, of its distinctly dynamic character, and in terms of its establishments or inst.i.tutions. Accordingly the relation of the person to the cla.s.s is indeed that of the whole to the part, but of the whole in a state that is formally undeveloped to the part more or less highly developed, and of the whole as a living, functional activity, the differential operation of the unity of experience, to the part as an inst.i.tution or instrument.

From all this it appears that the labour involved in the maintenance and development of human life is divided between the person and the social cla.s.ses in some such way as follows. The cla.s.s life stands for a.n.a.lysis and special development and establishment; personal life for synthesis and vitality. The factional life of the cla.s.s is specialistic, and reaps for human nature all the familiar advantages of specialism; the personal life is general or universal, and saves human nature from the disruption and the stagnation to [p.164] which specialism and its formal establishment always tend. The factional life is mediative and instrumental; the personal life is initiative and purposive. And while so to define the distinction between person and cla.s.s, or in general to regard their relation as one of whole to part, even with the qualifications that were promptly added, may involve some unavoidable abstraction, and so some limitation of the view; nevertheless the view is as real and significant at least as the conditions upon which it rests. Even though persons may be differentiated from each other in an indefinite number of ways, no two being personal, materially, in the same way, no two having the same factional restraints, still the relation of whole to part, subject only to the distinctions of development and of dynamic or static character, remains significantly the typical relation of the person to the cla.s.s. The person may be only a part of the cla.s.s, as parts are merely counted, but in interest and possibility, in the fullest reach of his vitality, the person is larger than the cla.s.s. And, if this be the typical relation, then not only is the story of the person seen to be inseparable from that of the cla.s.s, but also there is clearly a real place in social life at once for the person and for the cla.s.s. Factional life lacks completeness and vitality, and personality, the living, integral expression of the unity of experience, supplies these defects. True, a conflict of cla.s.ses or factions may always be counted on, since the unity of the total life, which of course includes the cla.s.ses, will prevent their ever being indifferent to each other, and this conflict will make for both completeness and vitality, but [p.165] negatively, indirectly, always as if from outside. Only through the person can vitality and completeness be secured positively and directly and immediately. Personality, on the other hand, lacks definiteness and practical efficiency, and only the special mechanical life of the cla.s.s can supply these needs. So in the two together we see a most indispensable co-operation.

The person, furthermore, because of his particular cla.s.s affiliation, with the attainment in the way of skill and insight which this imparts, is always naturally under constraint not merely to overcome the specialism, but also to apply the special training beyond the immediate sphere of its development to all sides of the nature that is within him.

Out of the depth and breadth of his personal character, bounded only by the unity of experience, he must ever react against the narrowness and the factional ritual, and taking this ritual--or special professional technique--to be valid mediately rather than immediately, in spirit rather than merely in letter, must ever seek to translate his factional experience, its skill and its insight, to all parts of human life. Only so can he be true both to his special cla.s.sification and to his personal wholeness.

But an insistent question: Is such translation possible? On the possibility the case for either personality or a cla.s.s-divided society must finally depend. On the possibility hangs also the worth of this case to the general argument of this book. Logically, there certainly can be but one answer, and that an affirmative one, since a.n.a.logy, the primal condition of translation, must be universal [p.166] among the parts of any unity as well as between any part and the whole. No two parts, it is true, can be literal, prosaic reproductions of each other, but metaphors of each other all parts are bound to be, and any part and the whole must also have this relation of the metaphor, so that any acquired, more or less highly developed power of thought or action, however special and however technical, may and must have meaning throughout the whole life of the person or of humanity. Accordingly, with the acquired freedom of any part, the metaphors, relating part to part, may, if not must, flash to the remotest regions of the person's experience-world. The left hand, with its unconsciously developed power, of course usually unexercised, of mirror-writing, affords only a very crude ill.u.s.tration of what this implies, and a very imaginative ill.u.s.tration is in the flas.h.i.+ng of the morning light as it reaches height after height of the beholder's outstretched world.

The conclusions of logic in this matter have sometimes been questioned, if not defied. Quite properly, it may be, many people, and particularly many among scientists, have been in the habit of distrusting the leading of mere logic in the solution of their problems. But in this particular matter I think that no scientist has ever succeeded in making out a negative case. A few have tried to do so, have thought themselves for a time successful, and then in the end, though not without some reservation, have gone over to the other side. Probably their undertaking has been inspired by the extravagant views sometimes entertained, as when money-getting is supposed to educate [p.167] people to an appreciation of music and art, or a ready memory for one cla.s.s of things to imply the same facility in acquiring a memory of another cla.s.s of things, or skill in the use of tools to make a good dentist, or physical self-control or intellectual sincerity to ensure moral truthfulness. Whereas, if it could be remembered that no special training could ever be literally applicable beyond the particular sphere of its attainment, the relation of part and part of human nature being only a.n.a.logous and metaphorical, and that in any scientifically observed case special training, when artificially acquired, or when a result only of a suggested and merely imitated routine, can hardly count as conclusive evidence, the problem would lose much of its interest, and science would be ready even to accept the logical solution. Logically, then, the translation is possible, and scientifically there is no real evidence against its possibility.

As to the translation being positively natural or necessary, as well as possible, the suggestion may not be impertinent that whatever is truly possible must be also real; that is to say, certain of realization or rather somehow and somewhere, in some manner and in some degree already in expression. Even the possible can never have been made out of, or sprung up out of, nothing. Moreover, the translation here spoken of, wherein one developed side of life flashes its message, more spiritual than literal, to another side or the other side of life, plainly can require nothing unnatural. It exacts only that all the different elements of our nature and experience, whether as personally or as factionally manifested, shall be [p.168] forever true to their origin.

The apparent obstacles to translation certainly cannot be obstacles on the ground of the a.n.a.logies of the various parts being only metaphorical instead of literal, for already in the original differentiation that has made person and faction, that has separated the parts, these have been overcome. The very nature of the person is their overcoming. The unity of experience must persist a.s.sertive and inviolable, whatever the divisions of experience. The distinct vertebrae must always contain a spinal cord that has a common origin with them.

And it remains to be said that since the person is thus at once the living integral exponent of the unity of experience and the member of some cla.s.s or faction, translation is his most characteristic activity.

In this translation, too, we see him a leader, or a party to real leaders.h.i.+p, by nature. In it lies his true genius. Indeed, this translation is just that which makes the great leader or the great genius, for through it the person is ever showing himself superior to his cla.s.s and training, and to the formal inst.i.tutions that have brought him up. Factional life, as we know, develops through imitation and repet.i.tion, but personality through invention under guidance of the flas.h.i.+ng a.n.a.logies. Invention, too, the application of special development beyond the sphere of its origin, is only the psychological term for what sociologically is leaders.h.i.+p. In the theory and in the practice of art, morals, religion, politics, science, and all the other special sides of experience, the factional and the personal are ever to be distinguished in this way--the one imitative, the other inventive.

Witness [p.169] the familiar ant.i.theses between the typical and the vital in art-expression, the formally ideal and the really pleasant in morality, the legal and the sovereign in politics, the orthodox and the spiritually alive in religion, technical skill and originality in science, and so on. These ant.i.theses are all very important to the understanding of human experience, particularly of its history, but they are frequently seriously misapplied. More than anything else they show the personal ever a.s.serting its superiority over the factional; the living whole, over the developed, established part; and always in order that the whole, overcoming the exclusiveness of the part, may translate and appropriate its acquirements.

There is thus a case for personality hidden in that historical a.n.a.logy of the individual to its group-divided environment, whether society or nature, and there is also an equally strong case for society as something distinct, as something that has its own peculiar work to do.

The roles, too, that belong to personality and society are as distinct and as real, besides being as organic to each other, as in general are whole and part. But the person, at once a corrector of partiality and a leader, a distributor of special development, holds a conspicuous place and moreover takes a part that just because of his essential superiority to the definite and formal is of the greatest moment to our conclusions as to the nature of all positive experience. All positive, formal experience we found defective even to the extent of paradox or contradiction, but personality, characteristically, must be superior to this defect. Personality must bridge all [p.170] the divisions of experience, all the gaps in society, all the chasms of history. It must be, though perhaps one may not safely use the word, the very incarnation of that spirit of truth, that principle of validity and power for adequacy, which has already come to our notice more than once.

Factionally experience is relative, phenomenal, divided against itself; factionally, too, it is at once formal and contradictory; but personally it reaches beyond the forms and contradictions, and is directly in touch with what is true and real. So the contrast between the personal and the social, the vital and the formal, shows itself quite parallel to that between the real and the phenomenal, the true and the paradoxical.

A business man says to a friend: "Personally, as you know perfectly well, I should prefer to do what you ask, but professionally I simply cannot, for you know also that business is business." A preacher declares: "Personally I should just like to speak out clearly and without restraint, but my church will not let me." Personally the soldiers in opposite camps exchange many courtesies, but factionally, professionally, they meet with rifle and sword on the battlefield. The father punis.h.i.+ng his offending child says: "This hurts me more than you." And, in general, personally there are no divisions of life--all are all things together, and restraints that separate man and man are lacking; but factionally there is always restraint, and open conflict and inner inconsistency are unavoidable. The person is thus the medium, not of an abstract universality, but concretely, through his factional training and his leaders.h.i.+p, of the universal life.

[p.171] And, finally, the life of the person is gifted with a great faith, for it is in touch with an untethered reality; but, factionally, life is a constant doubting, for it is constantly narrow and it is a constant contending. So are faith and doubt as close to each other, as inseparable, as whole and part, as person and cla.s.s, and with this conclusion we seem to have won for the doubter the right to say confidently: "My doubts cannot destroy me; I am; even in me there dwells the power that makes for reality; even in me, in spite of the very defects that the conditions of my social life impose, there lives the spirit of truth. Nay, even the social life itself, when mine as well as social, is also real and true."

[1] This paragraph, and many of the paragraphs that follow it, except for considerable revision and adaptation, were published some time ago.

See an article, "The Personal and the Factional in Society," in the _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods_, Vol. II, No. 13, 1906.