A Grammar of Freethought 3 – Cohen · Verses Across
Freethought · Atheism
A Grammar of Freethought 3Life and Mind
18
Freethought · Atheism
A Grammar of Freethought 3
Life and Mind
CohenEnglish
The outstanding feature of what may be called the natural history of associated life is the way in which biologic processes are gradually dominated by psychologic ones. Whatever be the nature of mind, a question that in no way concerns us here, there is no denying the importance of the phenomena that come within that category. To speak of the first beginnings of mind is, in this connection, idle language. In science there are no real beginnings. Things do not begin to be, they simply emerge, and their emergence is as imperceptible as the displacement of night by day, or the development of the chicken from the egg. But whatever the nature of the beginning of mind, its appearance in the evolutionary series marked an event of profound and revolutionary importance. Life received a new impetus, and the struggle for existence a new significance, the importance of which is not, even to-day, generally recognized. The old formulae might still be used, but they had given to them a new significance. The race was still to the swift and the battle to the strong, but swiftness and strength were manifested in new ways and by new means. Cunning and intelligence began to do what was formerly done without their co-operation. A new force had appeared, arising out of the older forces as chemistry develops from physics and biology from both. And, as we should expect from analogy, we find the new force dominating the older ones, and even bending them to its needs.
Associated life meets us very early in the story of animal existence, and we may assume that it ranks as a genuine "survival quality." It enables some animals to survive the attacks of others that are individually stronger, and it may even be, as has been suggested, that associated life is the normal form, and that solitary animals represent a variation from the normal, or perhaps a case of degeneration. But one result of associated life is that it paves the way for the emergence of mind as an active force in social evolution. In his suggestive and important work on Mutual Aid, Kropotkin has well shown how in the animal world the purely biologic form of the struggle for existence is checked and transformed by the factors of mutual aid, association and protection. His illustrations cover a very wide field; they include a great variety of animal forms, and he may fairly claim to have established the proposition that "an instinct has been slowly developed among animals and men in the course of an extremely long evolution ... which has taught animals and men alike the force they can borrow from mutual aid and support, and the joys they can find in social life."
But there is, on the whole, a very sharp limit set to the development of mind in the animal world. One cause of this is the absence of a true "social medium," to use the admirable phrase of that versatile thinker, George Henry Lewes. In the case of man, speech and writing enable him to give to his advances and discoveries a cumulative force such as can never exist in their absence. On that subject more will be said later. At present we may note another very important consequence of the development of mind in evolution. In pre-human, or sub-human society, perfection in the struggle for existence takes the form of the creation or the perfecting of an organic tool. Teeth or claws become stronger or larger, a limb is modified, sight becomes keener, or there is a new effect in coloration. The changes here, it will be observed, are all of an organic kind, they are a part of the animal and are inseparable from it, and they are only transmissible by biologic heredity. And the rate of development is, of necessity, slow.
When we turn to man and note the way in which he overcomes the difficulties of his environment, we find them to be mainly of a different order. His instruments are not personal, in the sense of being a part of his organic structure. We may say they do not belong to him so much as they do to the race; while they are certainly transmitted from generation to generation irrespective of individuals. Instead of achieving conquest of his environment by developing an organic structure, man creates an inorganic tool. In a sense he subdues and moulds the environment to his needs, rather than modifies his structure in order to cope with the environment. Against extremes of temperature he fashions clothing and builds habitations. He discovers fire, probably the most important discovery ever made by mankind. He adds to his strength in defence and attack by inventing weapons. He guards himself from starvation by planting seeds, and so harnesses the productive forces of nature to his needs. He tames animals and so secures living engines of labour. Later, he compensates for his bodily weaknesses by inventing instruments which aid sight, hearing, etc. Inventions are multiplied, methods of locomotion and transportation are discovered, and the difficulties of space and time are steadily minimized. The net result of all this is that as a mere biologic phenomenon man's evolution is checked. The biologic modifications that still go on are of comparatively small importance, except, probably, in the case of evolution against disease. The developments that take place are mainly mental in form and are social in their incidence.
Now if the substantial truth of what has been said be admitted, and I do not see how it can be successfully challenged, there arise one or two considerations of supreme importance. The first of these is that social history becomes more and more a history of social psychology. In social life we are watching the play of social mind expressed through the medium of the individual. The story of civilization is the record of the piling of idea on idea, and the transforming power of the whole on the environment. For tools, from the flint chip of primitive man, down to the finished instrument of the modern mechanic, are all so many products of human mentality. From the primitive dug-out to the Atlantic liner, from the stone spear-head to the modern rifle, in all the inventions of civilized life we are observing the application of mind to the conquest of time, space, and material conditions. Our art, our inventions, our institutions, are all so many illustrations of the power of mind in transforming the environment. A history of civilization, as distinguished from a mere record of biologic growth, is necessarily a history of the growing power of mind. It is the cumulative ideas of the past expressed in inventions and institutions that form the driving power behind the man of to-day. These ideas form the most valuable part of man's heritage, make him what he is, and contain the promise of all that he may become.
So long as we confine ourselves to biologic evolution, the way in which qualities are transmitted is plain. There is no need to go beyond the organism itself. But this heritage of ideas, peculiarly human as it is, requires a "carrier" of an equally unique kind. It is at this point that the significance of what we have called the "social medium" emerges. The full significance of this was first seen by G. H. Lewes. Writing so far back as 1879 he said:--
The distinguishing character of human psychology is that to the three great factors, organism, external medium, and heredity; it adds a fourth, namely, the relation to a social medium, with its product, the general mind.... While the mental functions are products of the individual organism, the product, mind, is more than an individual product. Like its great instrument language, it is at once individual and social. Each man speaks in virtue of the functions of vocal expression, but also in virtue of the social need of communication. The words spoken are not his creation, yet he, too, must appropriate them by what may be called a creative process before he can understand them. What his tribe speaks he repeats; but he does not simply echo their words, he rethinks them. In the same way he adopts their experiences when he assimilates them to his own.... Further, the experiences come and go; they correct, enlarge, and destroy one another, leaving behind them a certain residual store, which condensed in intuitions and formulated in principles, direct and modify all future experiences.... Men living in groups co-operate like the organs in an organism. Their actions have a common impulse to a common end. Their desires and opinions bear the common stamp of an impersonal direction. Much of their life is common to all. The roads, market-places and temples are for each and all. Customs arise and are formulated in laws, the restraint of all.... Each generation is born in this social medium, and has to adapt itself to the established forms.... A nation, a tribe, a sect is the medium of the individual mind, as a sea, a river, or a pond, is the medium of a fish.
Biologically, what man inherits is capacity for acquisition. But what he shall acquire, the direction in which his native capacity shall express itself, is a matter over which biologic forces have no control. This is determined by society and social life. Given quite equal capacity in two individuals, the output will be very different if one is brought up in a remote Spanish village and the other in Paris or London. Whether a man shouts long live King George or long live the Kaiser is mainly a question of social surroundings, and but very little one of difference in native capacity. The child of parents living in the highest civilized society, if taken away while very young and brought up amid a people in a very primitive state of culture, would, on reaching maturity, differ but little from the people around him. He would think the thoughts that were common to the society in which he was living as he would speak their language and wear their dress. Had Shakespeare been born among savages he could never have written Hamlet. For the work of the genius, as for that of the average man, society must provide the materials in the shape of language, ideas, institutions, and the thousand and one other things that go to make up the life of a group, and which may be seen reflected in the life of the individual. Suppose, says Dr. McDougall:--
that throughout the period of half a century every child born to English parents was at once exchanged (by the power of a magician's wand) for an infant of the French, or other, European nation. Soon after the close of this period the English nation would be composed of individuals of French extraction, and the French of individuals of English extraction. It is, I think, clear that, in spite of this complete exchange of innate characters between the two nations, there would be but little immediate change of national characteristics. The French people would still speak French, and the English would speak English, with all the local diversities to which we are accustomed and without perceptible change of pronunciation. The religion of the French would still be predominantly Roman Catholic, and the English people would still present the same diversity of Protestant creeds. The course of political institutions would have suffered no profound change, the customs and habits of the two peoples would exhibit only such changes as might be attributed to the lapse of time, though an acute observer might notice an appreciable approximation of the two peoples towards one another in all these respects. The inhabitant of France would still be a Frenchman and the inhabitant of England an Englishman to all outward seeming, save that the physical appearance of the two peoples would be transposed. And we may go even further and assert that the same would hold good if a similar exchange of infants were effected between the English and any other less closely allied nation, say the Turks or the Japanese.
The products of human capacity are the material of which civilization is built; these products constitute the inheritance which one generation receives from another. Whether this inheritance be large or small, simple or complex, it is the chief determinant which shapes the personality of each individual. What each has by biological heredity is a given structure, that is, capacity. But the direction of that capacity, the command it enables one to acquire over his environment, is in turn determined by the society into which he happens to be born.
It has already been said that the materials of civilization, whether they be tools, or institutions, or inventions, or discoveries, or religious or ethical teachings, are facts that can be directly described as psychological. An institution--the Church, the Crown, the Magistracy--is not transmitted as a building or as so many sheets of paper, but as an idea or as a set of ideas. A piece of machinery is, in the same way, a mental fact, and is a physical one in only a subordinate sense. And if this be admitted, we reach the further truth that the environment to which man has to adapt himself is essentially, so far as it is a social environment, psychological. Not alone are the outward marks of social life--the houses in which man lives, the machines he uses to do his bidding--products of his mental activity, but the more important features of his environment, to which he must adapt himself, and which so largely shape his character and determine his conduct, are of a wholly psychological character. In any society that is at all distinct from the animal, there exist a number of beliefs, ideas and institutions, traditions, and, in a later stage, a literature which play a very important part in determining the direction of man's mind. With increasing civilization, and the development of better means of intercourse, any single society finds itself brought into touch and under the influence of other social groups. The whole of these influences constitute a force which, surrounding an individual at birth, inevitably shapes character in this or that direction. They dominate the physical aspect of life, and represent the determining forces of social growth. Eliminate the psychological forces of life and you eliminate all that can be properly called civilization. It is wholly the transforming power of mind on the environment that creates civilization, and it is only by a steady grasp of this fact that civilization can be properly understood.
I have pointed out a distinction between biological and social, or psychological, heredity. But there is one instance in which the two agree. This is that we can only understand a thing by its history. We may catalogue the existing peculiarities of an animal form with no other material than that of the organism before us, but thoroughly to understand it we must know its history. Similarly, existing institutions may have their justification in the present, but the causes of their existence lie buried in the past. A king may to-day be honoured on account of his personal worth, but the reason why there is a king to be honoured carries us back to that state of culture in which the primitive priest and magic worker inspires fear and awe. When we ring bells to call people to church we perpetuate the fact that our ancestors rang them to drive away evil spirits. We wear black at a funeral because our primitive ancestors wished to hide themselves from the dead man's ghost. We strew flowers on a grave because food and other things were once buried with the dead so that their spirits might accompany the dead to the next world. In short, with all human customs we are forced, if we wish to know the reason for their present existence, to seek it in the ideas that have dominated the minds of previous generations.
No one who has studied, in even a cursory manner, the development of our social institutions can avoid recognition of the profound influence exerted by the primitive conceptions of life, death, and of the character of natural forces. Every one of our social institutions was born in the shadow of superstition, and superstition acts as a powerful force in determining the form they assume. Sir Henry Maine has shown to what a large extent the laws of inheritance are bound up with ancestor worship. Spencer has done the same service for nearly all our institutions, and Mr. Elton says that "the oldest customs of inheritance in England and Germany were, in their beginnings, connected with a domestic religion, and based upon a worship of ancestral spirits of which the hearthplace was essentially the altar." The same truth meets us in the study of almost any institution. In fact, it is not long before one who thinks evolution, instead of merely knowing its formulae, begins to realize the truth of the saying by a German sociologist that in dealing with social institutions we are concerned with the "mental creations of aggregates." They are dependent upon the persistence of a set of ideas, and so long as these ideas are unshaken they are substantially indestructible. To remove them the ideas upon which they rest must be shaken and robbed of their authority. That is the reason why at all times the fight for reform so largely resolves itself into a contest of ideas. Motives of self-interest may enter into the defence of an institution, and in some case may be responsible for the attempt to plant an institution where it does not already exist, but in the main institutions persist because of their harmony with a frame of mind that is favourable to their being.
A great deal of criticism has been directed against the conclusion of Buckle that improvement in the state of mankind has chiefly resulted from an improvement in the intellectual outlook. And yet when stated with the necessary qualifications the generalization is as sound as it can well be. Certainly, the belief held in some quarters, and stated with an air of scientific precision, that the material environment is the active force which is ever urging to new mental development will not fit the facts; for, as we have seen, the environment to which human nature must adapt itself is mainly mental in character, that is, it is made up in an increasing measure of the products of man's own mental activity. The theory of the sentimental religionist that the evil in the world results from the wickedness of man, or, as he is fond of putting it, from the hardness of man's heart, is grotesque in its ineffectiveness. Soft heads have far more to do with the evil in the world than have hard hearts. Indeed, one of the standing difficulties of the orthodox moralist is, not to explain the deeds of evil men, which explain themselves, but to account for the harm done by "good" men, and often as a consequence of their goodness. The moral monster is a rarity, and evil is rarely the outcome of a clear perception of its nature and a deliberate resolve to pursue it. Paradoxical as it may sound, it demands a measure of moral strength to do wrong, consciously and deliberately, which the average man or woman does not possess. And the world has never found it a matter of great difficulty to deal with its "bad" characters; it is the "good" ones that present it with a constant problem.
The point is worth stressing, and we may do it from more than one point of view. We may take, first of all, the familiar illustration of religious persecution, as exemplified in the quarrels of Catholics and Protestants. On the ground of moral distinction no line could be drawn between the two parties. Each shuddered at the persecution inflicted by the other, and each regarded the teachings of the other with the same degree of moral aversion. And it has often been noted that the men who administered so infamous an institution as the Inquisition were not, in even the majority of cases, bad men. A few may have had interested motives, but it would have been impossible to have maintained so brutal an institution in the absence of a general conviction of its rightness. In private life those who could deliver men, women, and even children over to torture were not worse husbands or parents than others. Such differences as existed cannot be attributed to a lack of moral endeavour, or to a difference of "moral temperament." It was a difference of intellectual outlook, and given certain religious convictions persecution became a religious necessity. The moral output was poor because the intellectual standpoint was a wrong one.
If we could once get over the delusion of thinking of human nature as being fundamentally different five hundred years ago from what it is to-day, we should escape a great many fallacies that are prevalent. The changes that have taken place in human nature during the historic period are so slight as to be practically negligible. The motives that animate men and women to-day are the motives that animated men and women a thousand or two thousand years ago. The change is in the direction and form of their manifestation only, and it is in the light of the human nature around us that we must study and interpret the human nature that has gone before us. From that point of view we may safely conclude that bad institutions were kept in being in the past for the same reason that they are kept alive to-day. The majority must be blind to their badness; and in any case it is a general perception of their badness which leads to their destruction.
The subject of crime illustrates the same point. Against crime as such, society is as set as ever. But our attitude toward the causation and cure of crime, and, above all, to the treatment of the criminal, has undergone a profound alteration. And the change that has taken place here has been away from the Christian conception which brutalized the world for so long, towards the point of view taken up by the ancient Greeks, that wrong doing is the outcome of ignorance. Expressed in the modern manner we should say that crime is the result of an undeveloped nature, or of a pathological one, or of a reversion to an earlier predatory type, or the result of any or all of these factors in combination with defective social conditions. But this is only another way of saying that we have exchanged the old, brutal, and ineffective methods for more humane and effective ones because we look at the problem of crime from a different intellectual angle. A more exact knowledge of the causation of crime has led us to a more sensible and a more humane treatment of the criminal. And this, not alone in his own behalf, but in the interests of the society in which he lives. We may put it broadly that improvement comes from an enlightened way of looking at things. Common observation shows that people will go on tolerating forms of brutality, year after year, without the least sense of their wrongness. Familiarity, and the absence of any impetus to examine current practice from a new point of view seem to account for this. In the seventeenth century the same people who could watch, without any apparent hostility, the torture of an old woman on the fantastic charge of intercourse with Satan, had their feelings outraged by hearing a secular song on Sunday. Imprisonment for "blasphemy," once regarded as a duty, has now become ridiculous to all reasonable people. At one and the same time, a little more than a hundred years ago in this country, the same people who could denounce cock-fighting on account of its brutality, could watch unmoved the murdering of little children in the factories of Lancashire. Not so long ago men in this country fought duels under a sense of moral compulsion, and the practice was only abandoned when a changed point of view made people realize the absurdity of trying to settle the justice of a cause by determining which of two people were the most proficient with sword or pistol. We have a continuation of the same absurdity in those larger duels fought by nations where the old verbal absurdities still retain their full force, and where we actually add another absurdity by retaining a number of professional duellists who must be ready to embark on a duel whether they have any personal feeling in the matter or not. And it seems fairly safe to say that when it is realized that the duel between nations as a means of settling differences is not a bit more intellectually respectable than was the ancient duello we shall not be far removed from seeing the end of one of the greatest dangers to which modern society is exposed.
Examples might be multiplied indefinitely, but enough has been said to show what small reason there is for assuming that changes in institutions are brought about by the operation of some occult moral sense. It is the enlightenment of the moral sense by the growth of new ideas, by the impact of new knowledge leading to a revaluation of things that is mainly responsible for the change. The question of whether a man should or should not be burned for a difference in religious belief was never one that could be settled by weighing up the moral qualities of the two parties in the dispute. All the moral judgment that has ever existed, even if combined in the person of a single individual could never decide that issue. It was entirely a question of acquiring a new point of view from which to examine the subject. Until that was done the whole force of the moral sense was on the side of the persecutor. To put the matter paradoxically, the better the man the worse persecutor he became. It was mental enlightenment that was needed, not moral enthusiasm.
The question of progress thus becomes, in all directions, one of the impact of new ideas, in an environment suitable to their reception and growth. A society shut in on itself is always comparatively unprogressive, and but for the movement of classes within it would be completely so. The more closely the history of civilization is studied the more clearly does that fact emerge. Civilization is a synthetic movement, and there can be no synthesis in the absence of dissolution and resolution.
A fight of old ideas against new ones, a contest of clashing culture levels, a struggle to get old things looked at from a new point of view, these are the features that characterize all efforts after reform. It was said by some of the eighteenth century philosophers that society was held together by agreement in a bond. That is not quite correct. The truth is that society is held together, as is any phase of social life, by a bond of agreement. The agreement is not of the conscious, documentary order, but it is there, and it consists in sharing a common life created and maintained by having a common tradition, and a common stock of ideas and ideals. It is this that makes a man a member of one social group rather than of another--Chinese, American, French, German, or Choctaw. There is no discriminating feature in what is called the economic needs of people. The economic needs of human beings--food, clothing, and shelter, are of the same order the world over. And certainly the fact of a Chinaman sharing in the economic life of Britain, or an Englishman sharing in the economic life of China, would not entitle either to be called genuine members of the group in which he happened to be living. Membership only begins to be when those belonging to a group share in a common mental outfit. Even within a society, and in relation to certain social groups, one can see illustrations of the same principle. A man is not really a member of a society of artists, lawyers, or doctors merely by payment of an annual subscription. He is that only when he becomes a participant in the mental life of the group. It is this common stock of mental facts which lies at the root of all collective ideas--an army, a Church, or a nation. And ever the fight is by way of attack and defence of the psychologic fact.
To do the Churches and other vested interests justice, they have never lost sight of this truth, and it would have been better for the race had others been equally alive to its importance. The Churches have never ceased to fight for the control of those public organs that make for the formation of opinion. Their struggle to control the press, the platform, and the school means just this. Whatever they may have taught, self-interest forced upon them recognition of the truth that it was what men thought about things that mattered. They have always opposed the introduction of new ideas, and have fought for the retention of old ones. It was a necessity of their existence. It was also an admission of the truth that in order for reform to become a fact the power of traditional ideas must be broken. Man is what he thinks, is far nearer the truth than the once famous saying, "Man is what he eats." As a member of a social group man is dominated by his ideas of things, and any movement of reform must take cognisance of that fact if it is to cherish reasonable hopes of success.
