GIFT OF 
 JANE KoSATHER 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 
 
Contemporaneity with the present sets 
 the bounds of both the historic past and 
 the historic future. The past is not dead, 
 the future not unborn, but past and future 
 alike are vital incidents of life now. His- 
 tory, what but organic recapitulation and 
 preparation, the present's consciousness of 
 its all-including self ! 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 
 
 AN INTRODUCTION 
 
 TO THC 
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL STUDY Or POLITICS 
 
 ALFRED H. LLOYD 
 
 AUTHOR OF "CITIZENSHIP AND SALVATION" AND 
 "DYNAMIC IDEALISM " 
 
 ANN ARBOR 
 
 GEORGE WAHR, PCTBLISHER 
 
 1899 
 

 Copyright 
 
 By ALFRED H. LLOYD 
 
 A. D. 1899. 
 
PRCmCE. 
 
 A FINISHED book must always be to its 
 author only a program for future work. 
 Particularly is this true of a book that owes its 
 being to the discussions of a university lecture- 
 room. Thus, the present volume, growing out 
 of work with students jn political philosophy 
 and the philosophy of history is only a prepar- 
 ation for something more extensive and philo- 
 sophically more satisfying, and publishing it as 
 I do for the use of my own students, who must 
 always be more devoted to thinking than to 
 knowing, I would have it viewed in no other 
 light. 
 
 And this is my second attempt to formulate 
 a view of history, the first being in Citizen- 
 ship and Salvation. * If the present formu- 
 lation does not help the understanding of the 
 earlier one I shall be greatly disappointed. 
 The view itself is not a new one, but an in- 
 
 * Citizenship and Salvation, or Greek and Jew. A Study 
 in the Philosophy of History. Little Brown & Co. 1897. 
 
 261204 
 
6 , . . . PREFACE. 
 
 ' cfividtai's statement always has some chance 
 
 of being serviceable. 
 
 A. H. L. 
 Ann Arbor, Michigan, 
 
 August, 1899. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Introduction 9 
 
 Part I. 
 
 DATA OF HISTORY. 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. Time 21 
 
 II. Causation 37 
 
 III. Nature 54 
 
 IV. Individuality 59 
 
 V. Progress 80 
 
 Part II. 
 
 SOCIETY AND SOCIAL CHANGE. 
 
 VI. The Group in General 97 
 
 VII. The Human Group or Society .... 102 
 
 VIII. The Double Responsibility of Society . . 120 
 
 IX. The Stages of Society's Activity . . . 131 
 X. The Process of Society's Alienation from 
 
 Itself 143 
 
 XI. The Process of Society's Restoration to 
 
 Itself 168 
 
 Xn. Progress in the Activity of Society . . 201 
 
8 , CONTENTS, 
 
 Parr ill. 
 
 HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 
 XIII. Reason and Religion 211 
 
 XIV. Good and Evil 222 
 
 XV. Revolution . 234 
 
 XVI. The Great Man 24a 
 
 Conclusion 249 
 
 Index 253, 
 
PHILOSOPHY or HISTORY 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 PHILOSOPHY is always to be distinguished 
 from science. Science, judged according 
 to her own account of herself, is the interest 
 in knowledge just for knowledge's sake, but 
 philosophy is interested in knowledge not as 
 mere knowledge but as motive. According to 
 philosophy knowledge must be more than 
 formally true and consistent; it must be also 
 liberative. Knowledge for knowledge's sake 
 is necessarily abstract; or, if seeming concrete, 
 it is so with reference to something to which 
 the knower is denied any vital relation, and to 
 be concrete on these terms is to reach the very 
 summits of abstraction. Only knowledge as 
 the truth that sets you free, that moves not- 
 the knowing but the living and acting self to 
 expression, is strictly concrete. The philos- 
 opher, just in view of his interest in acknowl- 
 edge that^ is, liberative and concrete is^to^be 
 
10 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 classed with the seekers after the wisdom of 
 life, with the laborers and the reformers in so- 
 ciety, with those whose little knowledge is 
 ever a great striving and whose striving never 
 fails to awaken the wish for greater knowledge. 
 His seeking for knowledge is their seeking be- 
 come special and intense and responsible not 
 to any limited sphere of activity but to the 
 universe. If he turns to science and he al- 
 ways dees and always must it is solely that 
 he may apply and animate scientific ideas. 
 
 Of course scientific ideas can not be applied 
 and animated until all the separate sciences 
 are made fully responsible to each other, until 
 they have been tested, each one and all of 
 them, as theories of the universe, or finally 
 until they have been brought under a single 
 organizing and transfiguring idea, but in spite 
 of this duty to interpret and organize the 
 sciences the philosopher never loses his inter- 
 est in a truth that liberates. The history of 
 philosophy is but a record of the ideas, both in 
 their temporal sequence and in their logical 
 relations, that have been the central and con- 
 trolling motives of man's progress. 
 
 But the philosophy of history, which is the 
 concern of this book, is not exactly the criti- 
 
INTRODUCTION. II 
 
 cism and interpretation of a particular science 
 in the light of a theory of the universe, as 
 what has been said so far might seem to im- 
 ply. It is not this, however, for the simple 
 reason that history is to be regarded rather as 
 a method in all the sciences than as a science 
 by itself. True, when we speak of history, we 
 usually understand that the account of man's 
 progress and civilization is intended, but it is 
 true also that the history of man, although a 
 special branch of investigation, is after all only 
 a means or a method in the science of politics. 
 To man the story of his own achievements is 
 so absorbmg that he allows himself for a time 
 to be diverted from the end that the story 
 really has in view, but this diversion neither 
 prevents the ultimate subordination of the his- 
 tory of civilization to the science of politics, 
 nor makes the relation of the two in any essen- 
 tial way different from that of any history to 
 any science. Accordingly, although the direct 
 interest here is to be in the peculiar history of 
 man and particularly in the history of civilized 
 man, and although the chief illustrations of 
 such principles as may be brought forward are 
 to be taken from man's history, any reader, 
 who fails to find, at least between the lines, a 
 
12 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 philosophy of history in a more general sense, 
 will have failed to get all that this book is 
 meant to contribute. 
 
 To examine history philosophically, as the 
 foregoing account of philosophy implies, is to 
 examine the fundamental data of history, the 
 general facts or the general principles that 
 every historian takes for granted or is very 
 likely to take for granted, and in the examina- 
 tion to determine how far they are really and 
 consistently thinkable. The philosopher of 
 history, like the philosopher in general, must 
 see history as something in which he and his 
 fellows have had, have, and are to have an 
 active share. He must be able to say of his- 
 tory: ''That am I" or "That are we," and 
 because his responsibility is very broad and 
 very deep he can not do this without the most 
 thoroughgoing criticism. The mere story may 
 interest or entertain him, but it can not move 
 him, until it is found to be perfectly rational, 
 or until, as the same thing, it reflects his life 
 and draws him into itself. Not only must he 
 be able to rationalize his history as a series of 
 events but also he must know what history as 
 such is, what its meaning to experience and 
 what its place in the universe. The historian, 
 
INTRODUCTION. 13 
 
 for example, is ordinarily content to leave un- 
 examined the facts of time, causation, individ- 
 uality, progress, but the philosopher, eager 
 fully to understand history, can find no things 
 so important and so absorbing. 
 
 Some have insisted that the philosophy of 
 history has to busy itself with universal his- 
 tory and this is without doubt true, but there is 
 the intensive as well as the extensive way of 
 studying universal history. Determine what 
 time is, what an event in time is, what causa- 
 tion and individuality and progress are, and 
 what society is, and universal history is bound 
 to stand before you. Of course to reach these 
 determinations you need all the evidence or 
 illustration from actual historical records that 
 you can command, but the philosophy of 
 history itself is free from any necessity of a 
 complete record of history. The case is pos- 
 sibly somewhat like that, familiar to the biolo- 
 gist, of the organism that recapitulates its own 
 evolution but not fully and not literally. As 
 organic life is greater than any special stages 
 of its own growth, so history as an affair of 
 events and of individuals in general is greater 
 than any existing record. 
 
 The objection is often raised that to assume, 
 
14 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 as philosophy does, that history can be reduced 
 to a formula, that is to say, that history is the 
 manifestation of a law, not the mere achieve- 
 ment of man living in the past and struggling 
 against all sorts of obstacles, is to rob human 
 activity of spontaneity and responsibility, but 
 this objection is certainly very shallow or very 
 near-sighted, for exactly the opposite must be 
 r ue. Thus, spontaneity and responsibility are 
 certainly affairs wholly of the present, not of 
 the past, and just for the sake of the present, 
 that the present may be free, having some- 
 thing to guide its activity and to establish its 
 experience, it is necessary that the past should 
 appear in no other light than that of a law. 
 Had not those who have gone lived in a law, 
 and were we now unable to know the law in 
 which they lived, our freedom would be about 
 as empty and as useless as could possibly be 
 imagined. Moreover, if it is true, as we all 
 believe, nay, as we all know, that through the 
 course of organic life, or more narrowly of 
 human progress, the all-pervading and all- 
 controlling idea has been to rationalize exper- 
 ience, most assuredly there is no cause even 
 for the past to complain and much less for any 
 of us to complain in its behalf, when the life 
 
INTR OD UCTION. 1 5 
 
 that was is found to have been rational or 
 according to some law. The present, finding 
 the past a lawful past, does but say to those 
 that were: ''You have builded even better 
 than you knew; the longing for law, for unity, 
 in your life was no idle longing, since what 
 you sought I find to have been fulfilled." 
 Where motive and result are one, freedom 
 need not be questioned. 
 
 And also this is to be said here, although in 
 later pages the matter will have to be treated 
 at greater length. The life of the past and 
 the life of the present are wrongly thought of 
 as two lives, as different or unrelated. Not 
 those that are now gone once lived and we 
 live, but they and we are living; they in us 
 and we with them. When, looking over the 
 past, we think of freedom or spontaneity or 
 responsibility as belonging to the makers of 
 the past, we are in a very real and a very im- 
 portant sense, in a sense that is not a poetic 
 fancy but a wholly prosaic experience, turning 
 the creatures of yesterday into our own con- 
 temporaries. More than one writer has been 
 keen enough to see that contemporaneity sets 
 the temporal bounds of history, and a more 
 
1 6 PHIL O SOPHY OF HIS TOR V. 
 
 important principle for the philosophy of 
 history would be hard to find. 
 
 It is Hegel, I think, who has defined the 
 philosophy of history as comprehension of the 
 logic of human events, and with this defini- 
 tion no fault can be found, if the final making 
 of history be recognized as the true philoso- 
 pher's motive. An abstract logic is one thing; 
 a philosophy of history, quite another. But, 
 not to dwell upon this, there is a way to study 
 history philosophically that ought to be men- 
 tioned here, although it is not to be the way 
 of this book. Thus, one may study the 
 philosophical ideas, that have been, to quote 
 from above, "the central and controlling 
 motives of man's progress," and out of history 
 as wonderfully and compactly told in them 
 get a philosophy which at least for depth could 
 not be surpassed. This deeper study, how- 
 ever, is not to be undertaken here. My 
 work or our work at this time is to look 
 directly to the facts of actual history, not to 
 the organizing ideas of the philosophers, for 
 illustration of its principles. 
 
 And just a word more may be said as to the 
 method to be followed. In Part I, attention 
 will be given to a careful analysis of several of 
 
INTRO D UCTION. 1 7 
 
 the fundamental data of history, time, causa- 
 tion, nature, individuality, and progress; in 
 Part II, to a study of society and of social 
 evolution; and in Part III, to the considera- 
 tion of such special problems in an under- 
 standing of history as the great man, the 
 nature and function of evil, the conflict of the 
 spiritual and the secular, and the origin and 
 justification of revolution. And, finally, at 
 the end will be undertaken the very dangerous 
 and according to some who may be right 
 the very inartistic labor of drawing a moral. 
 
Part I. 
 DATS or HISTORY. 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 TIME.* 
 
 THAT time is one of the data of history goes 
 without saying, and fully to comprehend 
 history one must know just what time is. Is 
 time an independent thing, external to the 
 events or experiences that appear in it or is it 
 in some way intrinsic to its content? Is it real 
 in and of itself, even when empty, or, in such 
 reality as it has, is it dependent on the nature 
 of things, being when taken for itself only an 
 abstraction of something that is directly and 
 immediately involved in the very relations of 
 things, or in what makes and determines the 
 things themselves, or let us say in the activity 
 that the relations of things presuppose? Is it, 
 in short, a mere formal condition of history, or 
 is it a material condition? 
 
 Now, unless time should prove to be some- 
 thing wholly by itself and wholly formal, real 
 even when empty and so quite external to 
 
 *This chapter has already been published in large part 
 in The Philosophical Review, January, 1899. 
 
22 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 events, to discuss it abstractly, as I am now 
 proposing to do, is to engage in a process of 
 vivisection, which is always injurious if not 
 fatal. Moreover, in this chapter, time will be 
 found to be dependent instead of self-existent 
 or external or formal. In its existence, in its 
 peculiar character and in its peculiar function 
 it will be seen to be determined by the other 
 data of history, and they by it. So at the 
 start we may as well recognize the vivisection 
 that we are engaged in, and with the recogni- 
 tion postpone any final conclusions until the 
 data of history as a living whole can stand and 
 move before us. But, for the present, upon 
 just what grounds is the self-existence or the 
 formal character of time to be denied.-* 
 
 Well, in the first place, it is to be remarked 
 that our question as to whether time is self- 
 existent or dependent, formal or material, is 
 only a special case of the general inquiry, with 
 which the thought of modern times has been 
 long imbued, as to whether the one and the 
 many, unity and differences, are or are not 
 functions of each other. Are differences es- 
 sential to unity or is unity an abstract some- 
 thing that is quite independent of the differ- 
 ences in whatever is unified? Of course in the 
 
TIME. i^ 
 
 conception of an organism we have the one 
 and the many, unity and differences, presented 
 to us as interdependent and interdetermining, 
 but even in these days not everybody is will- 
 ing to accept all the consequences of this con- 
 ception. As regards time, then, it is only one 
 of the ways or media through which differ- 
 ences are unified. It is, to be sure, an ex- 
 tremely physical form of unification, but herein 
 is nothing to place it out of the category to 
 which I have just now assigned it. Space is 
 another so-called physical form of unification, 
 and philosophy is still asking about it as about 
 time and as about unity in senses much less 
 physical, if it is external to or intrinsic to the 
 things that it unifies. Our present problem, 
 then, is no peculiar problem; it is not isolated; 
 and to have seen it in its larger relations or in 
 its general character will certainly be of some 
 help in its solution. 
 
 But now to turn directly to the business of 
 this chapter, suppose we consider the conclu- 
 sions that would naturally spring from regard- 
 ing time as self-existent or formal. Four con- 
 clusions, that all merge into one as they are 
 understood, have seemed to me worthy of 
 mention. 
 
24 PHIL O SOPHY OF HIS TOR V. 
 
 In the first place, if time is merely formal, 
 all events in time are necessarily external to 
 each other and a history of merely dated hap- 
 penings, a history that makes no study of laws 
 or of causes, or of an organizing process, is 
 justified. Indeed, no other history than that 
 of separate events with dates would be possi- 
 ble. Simply, to appeal at once to the general 
 case, if you make the unity of things external 
 to their differences, you are bound therewith 
 to separate the things themselves; and, again, 
 specifically, if you make time external to 
 events, you turn history into nothing but a 
 broken series. I say a broken series, for con- 
 tinuity even in the most physical sense would 
 be undiscoverable. A self-existent, purely 
 formal time, by taking continuity to itself, 
 denies it to the mere content of time. 
 
 Secondly, if time is formal, the things in 
 time are sudden. Here, quite evidently, we 
 have but another way of viewing the isolation 
 referred to in the foregoing paragraph. Na- 
 tions, men, institutions, are to be thought of, 
 as if rising up out of nothing and disappearing 
 as suddenly as they come, and whatever is at 
 any time is only exactly that particular thing 
 which it is, being without any changing or 
 
TIME. 25 
 
 adapting or differentiating power or nature to 
 relate it to other things. No doubt we are 
 sometimes given to Hving as if time were only 
 a formal condition of life, but the result is to 
 make the days pass without any achievement 
 on our part, life for us being as empty as the 
 time that merely contains it, and to make such 
 changes as do occur the work of a brutal 
 chance or a lawless miracle. And, similarly, 
 in a formal time history is no record of achieve- 
 ment, but a record of only sudden happenings 
 or miraculous interventions. 
 
 In other words, thirdly, if time is formal, the 
 events in time are naturally and necessarily 
 under the control of some wholly external and 
 therefore of some wholly arbitrary agency. To 
 a people, for example, subject to some abso- 
 lute monarch or to some infallible church, 
 where monarch or church get their authority 
 from a world or a nature altogether alien to 
 this world and to human nature, time is a 
 mere form, the present having no significance 
 and the past and the future being unreal just 
 because past and future.* What wonder that 
 
 *When time is self -existent and formal the present is only 
 the absolute durationless now, the past is the wholly gone and 
 the future simply and only that which has not yet come. See 
 also my Dynamic Idealism^ ch. xii: "Time." 
 
26 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 through the middle ages the things of time 
 were said to be illusory and predictions of the 
 millenium were very common and the real or 
 the spiritual was made altogether opposed to 
 the temporal ! 
 
 But, fourthly, in the illusory character of 
 time, that necessarily follows from making it 
 formal or external or self-existent, lies perhaps 
 the most serious, the most thoroughly con- 
 demning conclusion of any that have been 
 mentioned. Of course the isolation of events 
 from each other, the sanction of chance or 
 miracle, and the positive recognition of a con- 
 trolling agency without are condemnatory 
 enough, but for my own part I find the notion 
 of time, or of anything else for that matter, as 
 an illusion peculiarly offensive. The other 
 conclusions stood for the moment without 
 question, but here the need of a radically 
 different view of time is absolutely imperative. 
 To find an illusion is hopelessly to unsettle the 
 point of view from which it is found and to en- 
 force adoption of another point of view. Sum- 
 marily, if time is ever an experience, then the 
 real and even the spiritual must be temporal. 
 But the real or the spiritual, you remind me, 
 must be eternal. Very true, and in conse- 
 
TIME. 27 
 
 quence there must be a sense in which the 
 temporal and the eternal are not mere oppo- 
 sites, or mere negatives, of each other. And 
 can we not find this sense? Can we not bring 
 eternal spirit into the temporal? Can we not 
 find in time, not something that is self-existent, 
 for the self-existence ends in time as an illusion, 
 but something that will show time to be only 
 an abstraction of some essential character in 
 the sphere of the real? 
 
 To make time essential to the real is to 
 relate events positively or originally, to do 
 ^ away with all sudden beginnings and endings, 
 to find the control of changes not in an exter- 
 nal and therefore arbitrary agency but in the 
 actual nature of that which is controlled, in 
 an indwelling and only self-realizing process of 
 things, and above all to make both the past 
 and the future actual in the present and at one 
 with it. Obviously a self-controlling process, 
 a process that has its own determinations 
 within itself, within its own conditions, can 
 manifest only such differences as are organic- 
 ally, that is to say concretely related, and it can 
 have only such a past and such a future as are, 
 not external to the present, and so illusions, 
 but actual contents of the present. A self- 
 
28 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 controlling process at every moment of its 
 expression must both recapitulate its past and 
 anticipate its future. 
 
 What the foregoing means must be found, 
 at least in part, in that to which it is anti- 
 thetical. Negatives always afford important 
 help in interpretation. Still a direct or positive 
 statement always needs more than mere state- 
 ment. So, just what are related events ? 
 What is involved in the elimination of sudden 
 changes } How can control be from within } 
 And what is it to have past and future also 
 present .? These questions I can answer only 
 preliminarily in this place, but I may turn my 
 present labor into a pertinent illustration and 
 say that I can not but hope that the explana- 
 tions to be given here will have in themselves, 
 as something not altogether intangible and unin- 
 telligible, the future that subsequent pages are 
 to define more fully. 
 
 Thus, related events, which are of course 
 sequent, are in principle like the successive 
 experiences that one has when taking a walk. 
 The stages of one's progress, whether future 
 or past, are always present in the form of 
 actual relations to the sphere of the activity. 
 The walking is somehow only the temporal 
 
TIME. 29 
 
 expression of spatial relations or the fulfil- 
 ment of coexistences in sequences or of 
 sequences in coexistences, and this expression 
 or fulfilment would be impossible, were there 
 not an actual and complete organic unity in 
 all the differences involved. The action, I 
 say, or the walking can be but the realization 
 of already existing and ever existing relation- 
 ships. Were the relationships that are ex- 
 pressed not rooted in some permanent organ- 
 izing unity, were they not existing and 
 persistent, it is hard to see, nay, it is impossi- 
 ble to see how the activity could ever come 
 about or how the agent of it could ever know 
 what he was doing. Merely that he may 
 know what he is doing an agent needs an 
 environment as a sphere of coexisting things 
 or objects in whose relations he has repeated 
 to him the past moments of his progress and 
 foretold the future moments. 
 
 And in the circumstances of our illustration 
 we see also what is meant by the elimination 
 of sudden changes. The peculiar relation be- 
 tween the sequent and the coexistent that the 
 conditions of activity evidently require makes 
 continuity, as that alone in which the two can 
 be at one with each other, a necessity. Indeed 
 
30 PHIL O SO PHY OF HIS TOR V. 
 
 continuity is only a purely physical conception 
 of relationship. Here we do well to broaden 
 our view by thinking of the long process of 
 evolution, which is not essentially different 
 from that of walking. The larger facts of 
 evolution will help us to a still clearer concep- 
 tion both of the relationship of events and of 
 the continuity of change. Evolution has out- 
 come not only in a creature that has 'evolved' ' 
 but also in a vitally related environment by 
 which the creature's past and the creature's 
 future are made concretely present. More- 
 over a consciousness of the environment is as 
 necessary a condition of the evolutional pro- 
 cess as was the pedestrian's recognition of his 
 surroundings a necessary condition of his pro- 
 gress. Evolution needs consciousness, and 
 consciousness, in our larger illustration as in 
 our smaller, means both a relational unity of 
 coexistences and a continuity of sequences. 
 
 Also in the primary importance of conscious- 
 ness to evolution there is to be had still 
 another view of what now interests us. In a 
 word, life and consciousness can not possibly 
 be thought of as apart from each other. Con- 
 sciousness, then, is as original as life, and in 
 their common origin or, as the same thing, in 
 
TIME. 31 
 
 their constant contemporaneity is evidence of 
 their unity. Life, because it is Hfe, is con- 
 scious. Consciousness is intrinsic to life; it is 
 not under any conditions epiphenomenal. To 
 make consciousness a sudden appearance in 
 the evolution-series is to separate it always 
 from the life to which it is attached. Some 
 scientists, whose eyes must be closed to their 
 own visions, seem to enjoy the strange conceit 
 that science, as the best expression of man's 
 consciousness, is solely for science's sake, and 
 the same blind gazers, as if unwittingly cor- 
 recting their unseen error, have been wont to 
 raise animals to man's level by making the 
 animal consciousness also epiphenomenal or 
 for its own sake, and to raise the still * ' lower ' ' 
 forms of life to the animal's level by denying 
 consciousness to them altogether; but the very 
 evolution which they unwittingly justify would 
 be impossible on their scheme. Evolution 
 demands a consciousness or if you will a 
 science or a thought or a mind that is intimate 
 with the nature of whatever evolves. 
 
 But time as the form in which the sequences 
 of evolution appear is a peculiar condition of 
 consciousness, so that in identifying life and 
 consciousness we do in just so far make time 
 
32 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 essential to reality. True, somebody is likely 
 to turn upon us and declare that life itself is 
 not essential, that life began in time by some 
 process of abiogenesis or spontaneous genesis 
 and is not an ultimate fact in the reality of the 
 present and that time therefore is not of such 
 a nature as to make the temporal and the eter- 
 nal one, but to such an objector, it is only nec- 
 essary to reply that he means less by life than 
 we do. For us the life that can evolve is not 
 the special endowment of an isolated body or 
 of a group, large or small, of isolated bodies; 
 it is a property of the universe as single and 
 indivisible;* and with life so established and 
 conscious in and of itself the idea of time as 
 essential to reality is unassailable. 
 
 Life, or action, in its temporal sequences is 
 but the continuous expression of the persistent 
 relationships of coexistences. This is a formula 
 that is, confessedly, not pleasant, but it is quite 
 intelligible to all who walk and to all also who, 
 knowing the story of their evolution, look out 
 upon their present environment, which is so 
 obviously at once the recapitulated but con- 
 temporized past and the anticipated but con- 
 
 *In subsequent pages special attention is to be given to 
 the view of life that is here only asserted. See the chapter 
 on ''Individuality.*' 
 
TIME. 33 
 
 temporized future. And that life under this 
 formula is self-determined goes now without 
 saying. Simply there is no creation to make 
 determination from without necessary. There 
 is neither an external past nor an external 
 future to act upon the present and make it 
 helpless. But of the need, involved in mak- 
 ing time essential to reality, of finding past 
 and future actual in the relations of the pres- 
 ent, more may be said. Perhaps we are not 
 accustomed to look upon a creature's environ- 
 ment"^ as its past and future organically con- 
 temporized with the present, but in other ways 
 we are at least indirectly familiar with the 
 idea. Memories are recognized as states of 
 mind that are to be referred to present organ- 
 ically related physiological processes, and the 
 same is true of prophecies. Also as evolution- 
 ists or historians we are wont to explain the 
 past or the future by appealing to principles 
 that we look upon as independent of any of 
 the distinctions of time. Evolutionists to-day 
 are relying in so many ways on mechanics, on 
 chemistry, on physics, which in so far as 
 ''exact" sciences are also timeless sciences; 
 
 * It does not seem necessary for me to say here that as I 
 use the term environment I would have it all-inclusive. Ob- 
 viously a creature's own body is a part of its environment. 
 
34 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 and historians use nature and nature's laws in 
 their accounts of human achievement and 
 progress. That laws, however, or principles 
 are always contemporizing agencies, bringing 
 the past and the future to which they are ap- 
 plied into the present, is all but axiomatic. 
 Thus are we brought back to the view of en- 
 vironment already given, since environment is 
 not only the sphere of life's coexisting condi- 
 tions but also, as an object of consciousness, 
 the very incarnation of a more or less clearly 
 recognized law. In a formula, environment is 
 only the actuality, and one might almost say, 
 the substantiality of life's contemporizing law. 
 The biological doctrine of recapitulation, if 
 taken for what it is in reality, a doctrine of a 
 lawful environment as well as of the organic 
 unity of an individual creature, offers us a very 
 good concluding indication of what is meant 
 by time as essential to reality or by any of the 
 consequences of the essence-theory of time, by 
 the relation of events, the continuity of change, 
 the indwelling nature of control or determina- 
 tion, and the contemporaneity of past and fu- 
 ture with the present. 
 
TIME. 35 
 
 And now again the question, with which this 
 chapter began: What is time? Plainly time is 
 nothing in itself. An abstract definition of it, 
 however, may be derived from the foregoing, 
 although I should almost prefer to let what 
 has been said stand as it is without this addi- 
 tion. Time in and for itself alone, time as 
 mere duration, is definable as a physical or 
 quantitative abstraction for organic unity in so 
 far as organic unity involves change; or, differ- 
 ently and somewhat metaphorically put, it is 
 the change that is inherent in the organic, pro- 
 jected upon the plane of mere measurable 
 quantity. Similarly, space is the permanence 
 of the organic on the same plane. But, in a 
 statement that is possibly a shade less ab- 
 struse, time is an element in experience that 
 expresses abstractly at once the necessity the 
 past and the opportunity the future that a 
 world of related differences naturally affords. 
 Time, then, is no mere form of life, self-- 
 existent and external; it is even a force, or it 
 is a phase of a force, in application of which 
 or in identification with which life consists. 
 Those who live do not live in time; they live 
 
36 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 time itself, they use time; and a life that uses 
 time is as eternal as it is temporal.* 
 
 * Possibly I have made a mistake in almost assuming in 
 this chapter that the organic and the real are literally synony- 
 mous terms. One has to assume something, however, and in 
 another book, already referred to. Dynamic Idealism^ I have 
 considered at length the organic nature of reality. "Rela- 
 tionship among things is the criterion neither of a life nor of a 
 mind that exists apart from the substance of the universe. It 
 is, however, the criterion of substance itself, and as the cen- 
 tral truth about things it bears this witness: The universe it- 
 self lives; the universe itself thinks. ^^ 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 CAUSATION. 
 
 7TS a matter of form I may begin this second 
 '^ chapter by saying that our idea of causa- 
 tion, the second datum of history to occupy 
 us, has already been determined by the idea 
 of time to which we are now committed; and 
 this, although as has been suggested each new 
 study that we enter upon can not but react 
 upon all that precedes and give to it a deeper as 
 well as a clearer meaning. 
 
 Heat expands. Columbus discovered Amer- 
 ica. The University of Michigan was founded 
 by an act of 1837. The earth revolves about 
 the sun. Here are a number of statements of 
 causal relationship that in various ways illus- 
 trate what we have now to explain. Every 
 one of them, at least as commonly understood, 
 amounts -to an assertion that some individual 
 force or agency, as an antecedent in time, has 
 in and of itself, produced some subsequent 
 specific or individual change in the order of 
 
38 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 things. Even in the last of the four cases, 
 which is the case that might be most in doubt, 
 the sun is very likely to to be regarded as a body 
 that individually controls the earth's move- 
 ment; or, if not the sun, then some other 
 great central body, indefinitely remote, to 
 whose force the solar system as a whole is 
 made subject. 
 
 But causation, if individualistic, tempor- 
 ally sequent, and arbitrarily productive or 
 creative, is a conception that involves very 
 serious objections. In fact the objections are 
 so serious that upon being properly indicated 
 they condemn the conception itself absolutely. 
 
 Any individual that is in itself a cause of 
 something other than itself can not but be view- 
 ed as itself the effect of some other cause, while 
 that which it has effected must in its turn be a 
 cause of something not itself. In other 
 words, whatever is externally or arbitrarily 
 productive is also externally or arbitrarily pro- 
 duced; and, conversely, whatever is externally 
 or arbitrarily produced is also externally or 
 arbitrarily productive. Thus, in the sense 
 already pointed out, we can never say that 
 heat expands or that the University was 
 founded in 1837 or in general that a causes b 
 
CAUSATION. 39 
 
 without at once forcing attention upon an 
 indefinite, nay, an infinite series of causes and 
 an infinite series of effects. But strangely 
 enough, unless it is not strange but natural 
 that errors should eventually correct them- 
 selves, either one of the two series amounts 
 to nothing more or less in the end than the 
 universe as a whole to which the first observed 
 cause and its assigned effect alike belong. 
 Moreover, whenever in practice the two series, 
 that are also identical, are presented to 
 thought, the ultimate cause and the ultimate 
 effect, although perhaps regarded as separate 
 individual existences, are always conceived in 
 terms of a nature or principle that is alto- 
 gether independent of either spatial or tem- 
 poral limitations. The first cause and the 
 last effect are always, each of them, only the 
 inner nature or the inner law that the two 
 series have manifested. They are at once 
 terms in the series and all-including summaries 
 of the series. To give a very simple illustra- 
 tion, in childhood, youth, manhood, and old 
 age, there is presented a series, which has for 
 both its first and its last terms, as we conceive 
 them ordinarily, rather a conception of human 
 nature in the abstract than anything else. 
 
40 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 The child as father of the man is the man not 
 yet defined, the principle from whose expres- 
 sion the mature man is to spring, and old age 
 is but a defined manhood returning to the 
 spirit of its childhood. Both childhood 
 and old age show human nature at one with 
 itself, and to either of them we may look, not 
 for mere terms in the series, but for the prin- 
 ciple or the spirit, independent of distinctions 
 of place and time, that controls because 
 including the whole series. But this curious, 
 yet natural, outcome of the notion that causa- 
 tion is individualistic reduces any statement of 
 casual relationship to the simple if not empty 
 formula that the whole is the cause of itself 
 or that a real cause and its real effect are 
 identical. Therefore, whatever else may be 
 implied, causation is not individualistic. 
 
 Of course the individual, that is at once 
 arbitrarily productive and arbitrarily produced, 
 is only the isolated and sudden event of the 
 previous chapter in different clothes and the 
 conclusion about causation that our very simple 
 criticism has just brought us to is equivalent 
 exactly to our organic contemporization of the 
 past and the future with the present. Then 
 we spoke from the standpoint of time; now. 
 
CAUSATION. 4f 
 
 as if the two were separable, from the stand- 
 point of time's content. But, clearly, to 
 identify cause and effect is to contemporize 
 past and future. 
 
 And another equally interesting way of 
 reaching the same result is to regard directly 
 and specifically the objection to ever identify- 
 ing a mere temporal antecedent with a cause 
 or a mere temporal consequent with an effect. 
 A time interval, however short, between a 
 cause and its effect is fatal alike to one's idea 
 of time and to one's idea of causation. Not 
 to repeat what has been said already, the 
 interval can never be anything but a source of 
 possible if not necessary change or disturb- 
 ance. An antecedent cause can not be fully 
 responsible for its effect. A subsequent effect 
 can not be the real effect of its cause. Here 
 we have, as it were, a criticism that is inten- 
 sive in its view instead of extensive. Instead 
 of looking to the larger whole to which any 
 cause and its effect must belong, we are now 
 looking to what a cause and its effect within 
 their own sphere and through their own time 
 must include. A cause, then, that deserts its 
 process for however short an interval, can not 
 be sure of fulfilment, or whatever results from 
 
42 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 it can be referred to it only if it is ** ab- 
 stractly conceived," as Spinoza would say, that 
 is, confusedly identified with all the interven- 
 ing influences as making one continuous pro- 
 cess. A pistol-shot, for example, may and it 
 may not kill a man, but if cause and effect are 
 really separate in time, any treatment of the 
 wound would be at best only a game of chance 
 if not absolutely aimless and idle. Indeed, to 
 express the case at its extreme, there would 
 be quite as much reason for anyone who 
 heard a pistol fired to drop dead on the spot 
 as to do something for his self-preservation. 
 Whether he were hit or not would be an im- 
 pertinent consideration. In practical life, 
 however, we cannot desert for a single moment 
 what we are doing without damaging our 
 achievement and we certainly can not suppose, 
 as so often we seem to, that nature is less a 
 servant of her tasks than we are of ours. 
 True, every cause has an effect, every effect a 
 cause, but a cause is nothing more nor less 
 than an activity and its effect is only the man- 
 ifested conditions of this activity. Most 
 assuredly a wounded man is not dead until he 
 is dead and he lives just as long as he is alive. 
 Do excuse my positive inanity here, remem- 
 
CAUSATION. 43 
 
 bering that the fault is not wholly mine, so 
 long as others of my race, at least in their 
 minds, insist on actually killing their fellows 
 before they are dead or as the same thing in 
 principle making them live sometimes as if 
 after and sometimes as if before their actual 
 life-time. Obviously I have now left such 
 cases of death as those from pistol-shots and 
 taken a more general view. Deaths and 
 births are interests of historians as well as 
 of doctors and relatives. To make a, an ante- 
 cedent, the cause of ^, a consequent, is only 
 the general case under which falls, as special 
 and particular, the still common habit of 
 either condemning or praising men who lived 
 and died years or centuries ago as if they were 
 responsible to life as it is known today or as if 
 they were even behind instead of ahead 
 of their own times. It would be safe 
 for historians, for the sake of their history, to 
 remember that men, never being isolated 
 creatures, never can be either behind their 
 times or ahead of their times. Time and its 
 content are one, not two. Both the history 
 and the biology of today, not always directly 
 but very often indirectly, are given to the 
 offense, the anachronism, of separating cause 
 
44 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 and effect in time, and it suffices to say that 
 just as long as they offend in this way they are 
 making the processes, which concern them, 
 lawless, irresponsible processes, the study of 
 which can bear no fruit. 
 
 That a temporally antecedent cause is 
 always an isolated individual is an axiom 
 may I not now call it that ? which may help 
 to give unity to the criticisms that have been 
 made so far, but before taking another step an 
 accusation that may be brought by somebody 
 must be met. Perhaps I seem to have been 
 contradicting myself. Thus, at one moment I 
 seem to have insisted on dispensing with the 
 distinction of time and at the next to have 
 objected strenuously to any such thing, and 
 this appears seriously contradictory. The 
 organic contemporization, however, of past 
 and future with present, for which I have been 
 contending, has always been for the integrity 
 of historical order, not for its overthrow. No 
 antecedent is cause apart from its whole envi- 
 ronment and relating it to its whole environ- 
 ment is exactly what effects its contemporiza- 
 tion with its effect. Not Columbus, in 1492, 
 discovered America, but Columbus aided by 
 the trade-winds and other natural agencies of 
 
CAUSATION. 45 
 
 1899; or, again, in 1492 Columbus discovered 
 not the America of today but an America that 
 was only the ' * other world, ' ' which had become 
 more than a mere spiritual dream in Europe 
 even before the ships sailed. The famous voy- 
 age had only its own motive for its immediate 
 result; the result was no more and no less 
 than its motive. It became more, but that is 
 another story. So, returning, I say that my 
 apparent contradiction was only apparent. 
 The past and the future are relations, or 
 related parts, of the present; they are not 
 external causes, they are not external effects. 
 Thirdly, to object to an individualistic and 
 temporally sequent causation because it is also 
 creational is to be only just a little bit more 
 commonplace than I have been already. 
 Commonplaces, however, are the business of 
 philosophy. In addition, then, to what has 
 been said above, causation even ceases to be 
 causation if it is arbitrary; the effect of any 
 cause is so idle or so useless to the cause itself, 
 being as unmeaning as stones to a man asking 
 for bread or antiquities to speculators in stocks. 
 Modern science, so keenly interested in a law- 
 ful nature, has been established, it is true, 
 upon the familiar principles of universal causa- 
 
46 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 tion and the uniformity of nature; but the 
 effect of the universality and uniformity, which 
 the principles assert, has been to reduce 
 causation itself as a relation between two 
 things to a mere formality of sequence or 
 coexistence. For science causation has become 
 rather a form of thought than anything dis- 
 covered or discoverable in the objective world. 
 A lawful nature, dependent on uniformity and 
 universality, on conservation and indivisibility, 
 has forbidden anything even distantly sugges- 
 tive of creation. 
 
 But, if causation is not to be thought of as 
 individualistic, temporally sequent, and crea- 
 tional, what can we say of it.? We must come 
 to some definite understanding of its nature, if 
 for no other reason, at least for the sake of a 
 comprehension of history, in which it has such 
 an important part. True, a causation, which 
 puts the control of a process outside of the 
 process itself or in words amounting to essen- 
 tially the same thing which identifies cause 
 and effect with temporal antecedent and tem- 
 poral consequent, is offensive to thought; but 
 how else can the manifold changes of the world 
 be adequately explained.'* Merely t o conclude 
 that cause and effect are contemporary and 
 
CA USA TION. ^ 47 
 
 materially identical is anything but satis- 
 factory. 
 
 Causation, the causal relationship, as is 
 shown by the use that modern science has 
 made of it, is only one of the ways in which 
 we present to ourselves the unity of the world. 
 Accordingly, when we identify it with the 
 world's change or differentiation, our concep- 
 tion of it must depend upon whether in gen- 
 eral we think of unity and differences as mu- 
 tually exclusive or as intrinsic to each other. 
 If unity and differences exclude each other, 
 then causation is just that to which we have 
 been objecting so positively, but if, as we be- 
 lieve, they involve each other, if they are per- 
 fect functions of each other, then causation is 
 nothing more nor less than organic differentia- 
 tion. In organic differentiation the whole al- 
 ways is the cause of itself, the positive causa- 
 tion consisting only in the consistent or re- 
 sponsible expression of the organic relations 
 or in the interaction of parts that the organic 
 nature implies. For brevity's sake, then, I 
 shall hereafter refer to causation in this sense 
 as responsible or relational in distinction from 
 an arbitrary or creational causation. 
 
 Now exactly what our relational or respon- 
 
48 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 sible causation amounts to can be seen in part 
 at least by reflection upon such simple cases 
 of change or differentiation as travel and mo- 
 tion.* Travel is most decidedly something 
 more than leaving places and visiting places; 
 it is the expression of already existing and 
 never ceasing relations, the fulfilment and 
 maintenance of developed interests. And it is 
 this so truly that we are able to say, in spite 
 of the paradoxes, that a traveller always is at 
 his goal even when he starts, his future as a 
 developed relation or interest being concretely 
 present, and at his starting point even when 
 he arrives, his past also being concretely pres- 
 ent. If we think of travel in any other way 
 we forget do we noti* what we are. Only 
 travellers can travel; only creatures of mani- 
 fold interests or relations can ever express the 
 differentiation of a journey; and creatures that 
 have such interests travel in spite of them- 
 selves. Any organism, for example, is born 
 to travel, for the simple reason that it can not 
 leave home behind and yet must ever be visit- 
 ing new places. In practical life some seem 
 
 * Of these I haVte already written at some length in Dyna- 
 mic Idealism (see Ch. II. "Change."), but a little repetition 
 can hardly do any harm especially in the light of modern 
 psychology, which makes repetition impossible! 
 
CA USA TION. 49 
 
 to travel without having any previous relation 
 to the places they visit and some to lose their 
 old relations when they leave their homes, but 
 the seeming is only a seeming. A tellow- 
 countryman once slapped me on the shoulder 
 in the streets of Berlin and relying on my 
 American patriotism walked with me for sev- 
 eral blocks. He was rejoiced to meet me and 
 he told me of his very extensive wanderings. 
 ''Regardless of cost" he had gone **from 
 Rome through Florence to Venice and way 
 stations," and so on, and each place that he 
 visited had or had not ''met his expectations." 
 That was his formula and his experiences be- 
 gan and ended with it, so that I wondered 
 what could have brought him so many miles 
 from home. His money.? Certainly nothing 
 else seemed to relate him in any real way to 
 what he had come to. His money and his 
 formula were the sole motives of his travel, 
 since they alone kept him at home even in his 
 absence, for I must say again that the travel- 
 ler can express in his journey only the rela- 
 tions that he has, never entering a strange 
 place nor leaving a familiar one. 
 
 And what is true of travel is true of motion. 
 We think of motion as the expression of a con- 
 
50 PHIL OSO PHY OF HIS TOR V. 
 
 tinuous series of positions, but just because it 
 is this it is also just a little more than this. 
 Any position in the series involves all the 
 others, or is itself real only through its rela- 
 tion to the others, so that the motion instead 
 of being a mere succession or even a continu- 
 ous succession of positions is the expression 
 or realization of a system of relations. Ac- 
 cordingly things do not move, that is to say, 
 motion is not peculiar to things as' such, as 
 any one who has reflected at all on the rela- 
 tivity of motion has realized, but motion is the 
 relations of things in expression. 
 
 Change of any sort, finally, is of the same 
 character. As much the motive as the end, 
 as much the condition as the result of a life 
 that is essentially organic, it can never be any- 
 thing else but the expression of existing rela- 
 tionship. Not nature as a whole changes; not 
 the parts as mere parts change, nor do they of 
 themselves produce changes without, but the 
 change in nature is the interaction of her 
 different parts in fulfilment of the organic 
 whole. 
 
 **Heat expands," then, is a formula, which 
 we can now interpret only as meaning that 
 heat, instead of being a peculiar force acting 
 
CAUSATION. 51 
 
 upon external conditions and producing in 
 them what we know as expansion, is a force 
 that has expansion as one of its forms. Ex- 
 pansion is a special condition of heat, or it is 
 one of the many organically related mutations 
 of heat. The simple doctrine of the mutabil- 
 ity of forces is in its own rather indirect way 
 an assertion of just what has here been meant 
 by a relational or responsible causation. 
 
 And, even again to refer to Columbus, in 
 his discovery of America he owed much to the 
 winds and currents, and his journey resulted 
 only in the fulfilment of its motive. Europe 
 had come to have too realistic a faith in an- 
 other world, even in the present reality of an- 
 other world, she believed too strongly that the 
 other world was near at hand, to make the 
 change to the consciousness of America across 
 the seas seem anything but an experience for 
 which there had been an adequate preparation. 
 Columbus' journey was just like other jour- 
 neys, the fulfilment of developed interests. 
 Historians, thinking of his caravels and their 
 westward course, should remember that Amer- 
 ica came into European life, just as Christian- 
 ity came to Mediterranean life, only when the 
 times were ripe for it. 
 
52 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 Furthermore, as regards the third case, it is 
 a simple truth, evident to any one, that laws 
 and ordinances only define existing conditions; 
 they are never creative. The University of 
 Michigan existed in fact, it existed as a condi- 
 tion, before the defining or constituting act 
 was passed. Certainly the University had as 
 much to do with creating the act as the act 
 with creating the University. Similarly the 
 American constitution, in spite of the social- 
 contract theory that prevailed when our con- 
 stitution was formulated, is not and was not 
 creative, but only definitive of the social life 
 over which it has authority. Nor, obviously 
 enough, did man's discovery of the little for- 
 mula, V gt, introduce into the world the in- 
 teresting phenomenon of falling bodies. 
 
 And as for the earth's revolution about the 
 sun, it suffices to say that the law of gravity 
 or rather the inner organic nature defined by 
 the law is the true controlling centre clearly 
 not a spatially fixed centre of the system. 
 With a formal time and with an arbitrary 
 causation we should have to think of the 
 system as moving off into some unknown and, 
 what is worse, into some essentially unknow- 
 able realm. The movement would be noth- 
 
CA USA TION. 53 
 
 ing but unrest, displacement, without existing 
 relation to any goal; and the system's future 
 would be comparable exactly with that of a man 
 who had to walk forward without anything to 
 walk towards. But walking, that has a goal, 
 presupposes a contemporary relation to the 
 future, and the music of the heavenly spheres 
 has the same presupposition. 
 
 Causation, then, in the light of our criticisms 
 and illustrations, is as already described 
 organic differentiation, that is to say, the 
 consistent or responsible expression of an 
 organic unity or the interaction of the related 
 parts of an indivisible and persisting self- 
 asserting whole *. If reality is organic, unity 
 and difference being essential to each other, 
 no other conception of change is necessary 
 than this that makes it consist in the perma- 
 nence, the expression and maintenance, of 
 that which is. Still our notion of change and 
 causation must be lacking in clearness until we 
 have explicitly defined to ourselves the char- 
 acter and function of individuality. 
 
 * Other definitions of causation, already given implicitly 
 if nqt explicitly, are such as these: *' Organic contemporiza- 
 tion of past and future with present"; "manifestation of the 
 conditions of activity"; "unification"; ''responsible or rela- 
 tional activity "; and so on. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 NATURE. 
 
 BEFORE inquiring directly into the charac- 
 ter and function of individuality it will 
 be well worth while to extract from the fore- 
 going the view of nature that has been 
 involved. 
 
 Nature is a term peculiarly ambiguous but 
 other possible meanings of it aside the mean- 
 ing here has reference to nature as the sphere 
 of man's activity or for that matter of the 
 activity of any living creature. Nature here 
 means environment. It means the outer 
 world. It means the larger including life to 
 which we and so many others in some way 
 belong. And in this sense it has been an im- 
 portant datum of history. 
 
 But a very definite conception of the rela- 
 tion of living creatures, or human creatures, 
 to nature has been between the lines of the 
 conclusions which have been reached about 
 time and about causation. Briefly, then, to 
 
NA TURE. 55 
 
 begin with, if time is not a formal but a 
 material condition of activity, of history or 
 evolution, and if causation is not arbitrary but 
 responsible, then nature and man, or let us 
 say in general the sphere of life and life itself 
 are very intimately related. In fact the rela- 
 tion to nature is so intimate that at least for 
 man it is even a personal relation. This may 
 seem to be a suggestion for the philosophy of 
 religion rather than for the philosophy of 
 history, but in my own view it has as fitting a 
 place here as anywhere. Still let the word 
 itvSelf go, if it is confusing to anybody. In 
 any case, of the positive intimacy of the rela- 
 tion there can be no doubt. 
 
 A formal time both gives a broken history, 
 or broken evolution, and separates the present 
 phases of life from each other, and an arbi- 
 trary causation both means an original crea- 
 tion, or a succession of creations, and makes 
 present activities dependent on purely arbitrary 
 or external determinations. For a scheme of 
 thought, then, which admits a formal time and 
 an arbitrary causation, nature can be only a 
 general term for something that was, before 
 human life or any sort of life began, and that 
 ever since has been a source of external 
 
56 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY, 
 
 determination, or at least a something, adjust- 
 ment to which requires superhuman or super- 
 animate power. Accordingly, from such a 
 standpoint history can be only a struggle 
 against unfair condititions, a contest with 
 what is absolutely alien and unsympathetic; 
 and both progress and retrogression, whenever 
 either is seen to have taken place, can be ex- 
 plained only by the assumption of some inter- 
 ference, good or evil, from without. Of course 
 the recognition of such interference may bring 
 unity into what would be chaos without it, but 
 it certainly casts a fatal shadow over the view 
 that makes it necessary. 
 
 With time and causation in character as we 
 have found them nature appears at once as the 
 helpful mediator of man's activity, ever present 
 to hold him up in his struggle, not with her as 
 an alien and brutal force, but with himself as 
 directly and fully responsible to her. Nature 
 as outwardly present to him is only the envi- 
 ronment in which we have found past and 
 future contemporized with the present; not 
 something that was, before he was, and still 
 remains as far from him as before he came, 
 but something that holds him in and with her- 
 self as a mother her child. 
 
NATURE. 57 
 
 So conceived a life with nature, however 
 difficult the struggle, however sharp the ten- 
 sion of the manifold relations or responsibili- 
 ties, is in need of or should I not say is in 
 danger of? no interference from without. It 
 induces its own determinations. It is free, 
 that is to say, it is life, because the necessi- 
 ties are its own necessities. 
 
 But somebody here reminds me that man 
 has a spiritual nature as well as a physical, 
 that he is intimately related to the spiritual as 
 well as to the natural. This is perfectly true 
 and, curiously enough, it is exactly what I 
 mean, exactly what I am trying to show. 
 Man, not something apart from him, has 
 indeed a spiritual nature. The natural man 
 and the spiritual man are they two or only 
 one } If two, then our study so far has been 
 altogether idle. For us, to translate our con- 
 clusions into these new terms, the spiritual 
 can be but the expression of the natural or 
 physical; it can not possibly be escape from 
 the natural or from the physical. 
 
 Of course in changing our ideas of cause and 
 time we have also changed our ideas of nature 
 and matter and this should not be lost sight 
 of, for a nature that can be man's helpful 
 
58 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 mediator is a new, a transfigured nature. Its 
 face, perhaps, is too new and too bright for 
 any whose minds are still possessed with the 
 tenets of materialism or of materialism's 
 natural counterpart, spiritualism; but herein is 
 no reason for refusing to look upon it. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 INDIVIDUALITY. 
 
 p^OR a comprehensive philosophy of history 
 ' the individual must be something besides 
 what we ordinarily understand by a person, 
 and this means simply, among other things, 
 that personality itself must be in principle 
 something more extensive than our usual ap- 
 plication of the term would indicate. Indeed, 
 the usual application of any term is never ade- 
 quate to its inner meaning. Individuality, 
 then, really involves animals as well as per- 
 sons and things as well as animals. All crea- 
 tures are individuals. Things said to be living 
 and things said to be dead are individuals. 
 Molecules and atoms are individuals. And 
 what is an individual? 
 
 The views of individuality, I can hardly say 
 the possible views, since only one view can be 
 possible, but the views that need here to be 
 considered, are two; and, as might be ex- 
 pected, they belong to the two schemes of 
 
6o PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 thought, each to its own, that have been 
 treated and set over against each other in all 
 of the preceding chapters. Thus, either indi- 
 viduality is a matter of endowment or indwell- 
 ing nature and power, or it is a matter of 
 function, of organic function. But which of 
 the two can it be? 
 
 The endowment theory of the individual, 
 which almost at once will be seen to belong to 
 the system of thought that would have time 
 formal and causation arbitrary, is a theory 
 that makes force and life and consciousness 
 and will the peculiar indwelling properties of 
 that to which they are assigned. To express 
 force, as in the case of an atom or a molecule, 
 or of any pecuHar manifestation in nature, of 
 clouds, say, or of winds, or of stones, or of 
 heavenly bodies, is to act occultly, to act upon 
 what is in no sense a condition of the activity. 
 To live is to have relation to what is lifeless, 
 as in the case of an organism adapting itself to 
 essentially inorganic conditions; it is to be sub- 
 ject to what may fairly be called a biological 
 creed that sees life only under some precon- 
 ceived and unchanging and unchangeable form. 
 Witness the conception of immutable species 
 or of caste in nature, or of eternal election and 
 
INDIVIDUALITY, 6i 
 
 damnation, conceptions from no one of which 
 modern life, although perhaps generally liter- 
 ally free, can be said to be spiritually so. To 
 be conscious is to apprehend something with 
 which the conscious being has nothing to do, 
 consciousness whether of self or of what is 
 without, of the not-self if an indwelling en- 
 dowment being of necessity only epiphenom\ 
 eiial. Thus, it is a consciousness whose sen- 
 sations comprise but material elements fixed 
 in nature and value and so ** given" of 
 thought, and whose thoughts or inner states 
 are but the arbitrary unifying forms that re- 
 ceive the sensuous material as only so much 
 gratuitously profered content, and that are 
 themselves as fixed and as gratuitous as what 
 they receive; a consciousness, then, that at 
 one moment may seem to justify the doctrines 
 of the English sensationalists, and at the next 
 those of the French and German Nativists and 
 Rationalists. To have will, or volition, is to 
 act irresponsibly or creatively or, if I may re- 
 peat a term already used, to act occultly. 
 And, finally, to have force, and life, and con- 
 sciousness, and volition, is to be foUr distinctly 
 separate individuals all in one. Moreover, 
 and this is the striking fact, the endowment 
 
62 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 theory of individuality never finds and never 
 can find an individual in its universe that is 
 not, to all intents and purposes, all four in 
 one. 
 
 How can this be? Why, to consider only 
 two of the several cases, to live on the endow- 
 ment plan, not only as a matter of doctrine 
 but also as a matter of practice, is to make 
 the external conditions of life, that are sup- 
 posed to be lifeless, alive on the same plan\ 
 or, putting the same truth differently, on the 
 endowment plan the individual is not alive in 
 and of itself, so that anything, particularly 
 anything that is a recognized condition of life, 
 can live and in fact must live in the same ex- 
 ternal or beside-itself way. Also, secondly, 
 in the case of consciousness, the object of con- 
 scious is just as conscious as the subject. Ob- 
 jects are conscious, epiphenomenally conscious, 
 in what we are pleased to call their physical 
 or only sensible qualities. Berkeley was right 
 enough in finding nothing in a physical quahty 
 but a sensation, and Schopenhauer, among 
 others, in turning Kant's transcendentalism^ or 
 phenomenalism, into pessimism and voluntar- 
 ism. But, says somebody, it is supremely ab- 
 surd to say that objects are conscious. Per- 
 
INDIVID UALITY. 63 
 
 haps it is, but in the first place I am not try- 
 ing to avoid absurdities, only to draw conclu- 
 sions, and in the second place it is also true 
 that on the endowment plan subjects are in 
 and of themselves as unconscious as objects. 
 An epiphenomenal consciousness is no better 
 than ur^consciousness; nay, it is unconscious- 
 ness. So to be epiphenomenally conscious is 
 to be nothing more nor less than an uncon- 
 scious physical thing with sensible qualities, 
 and vice versa. And, further, for I will touch 
 very briefly upon another case, the will of 
 what the endowment theory regards a moral 
 or responsible being can not be in any respect 
 different from the indwelling force of a lifeless, 
 unconscious, non-moral, physical thing. Here- 
 after, in illustration of this truth, we shall see 
 that in history the notion of will or executive 
 authority as getting its sanction from another 
 sphere than that in which the expression or 
 execution takes place, or in other words as 
 being mediate instead of immediate, or given 
 instead of inherent, has always meant in prac- 
 tice that might, strictly physical might, brute 
 force, makes right. Names, it is important 
 for us to keep in mind constantly, do not nec- 
 essarily differentiate things. What history at 
 
64 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 one time chose to call the spiritual was the 
 physical also. 
 
 So, in its important consequences, the en- 
 dowment theory of the individual is now be- 
 fore us. Is it possible? Can we think it? No; 
 and just because, when made at all reflective 
 or self-conscious, it can not even think itself. 
 As if before our very eyes, it has already 
 passed out of itself. The necessity, which we 
 have discovered in it, of recognizing all indi- 
 viduals in every individual, the conscious in 
 the unconscious, the voluntary in the dynamic, 
 the lifeless in the living, and so on, has re- 
 vealed to us a theory none other than the 
 organic function theory which must find in 
 life and consciousness and will and force 
 only so many characters or principles that are 
 all of them, first, intimately or essentially in- 
 volved in each other and, secondly, not pecu- 
 liar and localized endowments, but affairs of 
 the universe as an indivisible whole. 
 
 Now this second theory is far from asserting 
 that stones are conscious voluntary beings or 
 that clods live. It asserts only, what was as 
 true to the endowment theory as to it, that 
 stones are as conscious and as voluntary as any 
 other bodies, even as your body or as mine, 
 
INDIVIDUALITY. 65 
 
 and that clods are as animate as any other 
 physical masses, even as protoplasm or still 
 more specifically as biophores, and then in such 
 assertions it sees, concealed perhaps but still 
 present and actual, another view its own 
 view of life and consciousness. Life and 
 consciousness, and also will and force, as 
 affairs of an indivisible universe, are what 
 can we say ? only principles of organization 
 or differentiation. Consciousness is the ten- 
 sion of organic relationship, or of organic 
 differentiation; life, a name for the activity 
 that such relationship or differentiation in- 
 volves; and will or force, the activity itself in 
 the light of the tension. Stones, or any ob- 
 jects, are accordingly conscious only in the 
 sense of being positive conditions of conscious- 
 ness, and clods live only as equally positive, 
 which is to say, essentially vital conditions of 
 life. 
 
 And precisely what is the individual in a 
 universe that, although possessing life and 
 consciousness and force and will, refuses to 
 be divided } Clearly it can be no separate 
 entity, whether atom or biophore or person, 
 with never mind how many separate in- 
 dwelling endowments. What then } An 
 
66 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 organic function which is obviously a taut- 
 ology; a relation which may seem an idle 
 abstraction to some but which is, to say the 
 least, as real, as concrete and palpable, as any 
 endowed entity ever was; or, finally, a respon- 
 sible activity which may sound sensational, 
 or sentimental, but which is not absurd neces- 
 sarily. Remember, we are indeed interested 
 primarily in a philosophy of the history of 
 mankind, but any mere sentiments that this 
 interest may excite are quickly subdued with 
 our duty to the individuality of atoms as well 
 as of men, of things as well as of persons. 
 Only the view, that takes heed of the universe, 
 can ever be worth our while. 
 
 Our individual, then, is an organic function. 
 The cell, the hand or eye, the laborer in a 
 factory where division of labor is expressed 
 and in some measure it always is expressed, 
 the social leader of any sort and every indi- 
 vidual leads in something, the pianist, whether 
 as one man among others or as an activity that 
 is in relation to life as a whole, or any animal, 
 whose life in any way serves its environment 
 as well as itself, is an organic function. 
 
 And, perhaps more generally, the individual 
 is a relation. Relationship, however, is exactly 
 
INDIVIDUALITY. 67 
 
 what organic function means, so that the 
 examples above are as apt here as there. But 
 also the point is a relation, being that through 
 which, so to speak, the conception of the 
 organic entered into the history of mathematics 
 or through which pure mechanics, finding 
 motion in a line and force in the motion, came 
 to light. The atom, as only a centre of force, 
 is a relation, and, so viewed, has made the 
 idea of mutability of forces, an idea which is 
 as biological as physical, a possible idea. The 
 star, or the planet, is a relation ; else the law 
 of gravitation would be a myth. 
 
 But the individual is a responsible activity. 
 In this third account the two others are fully 
 united or identified. Relationship, if real or 
 actual, is inevitable responsibility, and a re- 
 sponsible activity can not be anything else but 
 an organic function. Here, with the examples 
 already given, may be mentioned the members 
 of the family, the father, the mother, the 
 child. 
 
 Evidently the great difference between the 
 endowment theory and the organic function 
 theory is just this. The former completely 
 separates the individual and his activity : the 
 latter completely identifies them. 
 
68 PHIL O SOPHY OF HIS TOR V. 
 
 How do individuals arise ? This, under a 
 view that can recognize only a relational or 
 responsible in place of an arbitrary causation 
 and only a material in place of a formal time 
 is not a pertinent question. For our present 
 standpoint there is no question of mere origin 
 just as there is and can be no question of mere 
 destiny. Individuals neither come to be nor 
 cease to be. They are and they are ever in ex- 
 pression. The expression, as always at once 
 a differentiating and an organizing process, 
 has the effect of focusing or centering indi- 
 viduals in forms that are spatially and tempor- 
 ally defined, but it does nothing more. A 
 focused individual I do not quite like the 
 metaphor myself but I can find no better one 
 is only the specialized overt expression of an 
 activity that is as inclusive as the universe 
 itself. The specialization, of course, is due to 
 the tension or the consciousness, being both a 
 condition and a result of it, which is inherent 
 in the organic whole. Thus, handling, as an 
 activity, without being any less actual or con- 
 crete, is more general than hands, existing 
 before the development of hands and being 
 now more extensive than the hands that are; 
 and fatherhood and motherhood are more gen- 
 
INDIVIDUALITY. 69 
 
 eral or more extensive, both temporally and 
 spatially, than fathers and mothers; and cell- 
 formation than cells, leadership than leaders, 
 music than pianists, hammering than hammers, 
 thought than thinkers, motion than positions 
 or points, force than forces. Not by any 
 means that the more general and the centred 
 or focused individual are in any sense two, nor 
 that the consciousness of the one, in the sense 
 of consciousness as a tension of organic rela- 
 tionship, is not also the consciousness of the 
 other, that plainly is not my meaning, but 
 simply that the focusing, the differentiation, 
 makes the consciousness clearer and determines 
 more precisely the individual's place in the 
 whole. 
 
 Is this a new idea of individuality } Hardly. 
 If it were really new it would not be possible; 
 we could not think it. With what is pos- 
 sible, with what is true, we are always more 
 familiar than we ever know. Thus with this 
 idea of the individual as not some thing 
 apart from activity but as itself an organic 
 function, in which the agent and the act are 
 one and the same thing, the thought of today 
 must find itself, nay, is finding itself surpris- 
 ingly well acquainted. In almost countless 
 
70 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 ways, that are not always reflected upon, it is 
 identifying instead of separating individuals 
 and their activity. It is finding an identity 
 between what lives and life itself, between 
 what wills and the deeds willed, between what 
 thinks and what is thought, and between what 
 exerts force and force itself. Do I need to 
 give examples t Here are a few. The thought 
 of today is explaining men by their time; re- 
 ferring acts in general to their conditions 
 instead of to some external will originally good 
 or originally bad; taking, then, not the will 
 for the deed but the deed for the will; insist- 
 ing on proved capacity as the sole evidence of 
 right to authority; in short, putting character 
 and let me say, character of atoms as well 
 as of persons, for physics is not behind ethics 
 or politics above mere position. No longer , 
 are endowed rights or powers allowed to posi- 
 tions of any kind. Positions, everywhere, are 
 relations. 
 
 Here is a tool, a pocket-knife, the means to 
 somebody's activity; and are the agent and the 
 act and the tool to be treated as three things, 
 or two, or only one.? They can hardly be 
 more than one. Of course the agent is more 
 than a mere whittler, but also his act is more 
 
INDIVID UALITY. 7 1 
 
 than mere whittling, and the knife itself, in 
 which are embodied the very principles of all 
 tools, is more than a mere knife, so that, 
 although we see the three as different, we do 
 so only by seeing the agent, for example, and 
 the knife or the act and the knife or the agent 
 and the act from different points of view, 
 whereas such differences of view are not at all 
 fair to the question that we asked. An act, in 
 general, is often thought to be somebody's 
 application of natural force to his own ends, 
 and in this view the applying agent and the 
 applied force and the mediating activity are 
 not identified; but their separation is due to 
 the conflicting points of view, as just shown. 
 Surely, in the case of anybody's act, it is quite 
 as true that nature applies her own force or 
 that environment acts on itself as that the 
 individual applies the force or acts on the 
 environment. The application of any force is 
 only the expression of force as such, which is 
 to say, of all force. 
 
 Again, I cross my study to the thermometer 
 to find what the temperature is. Here, be- 
 sides activity, the fact of consciousness is 
 involved. This was not absent before, only 
 kept out of sight. Are my consciousness of 
 
72 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 the thermometer's record and the thermometer 
 itself and the temperature of the room three 
 things, or two, or only one? These also can 
 be only one. The thermometer does but show 
 nature, as it were, measuring herself, reacting 
 upon herself, unless forsooth the expansion of 
 the mercury is to be separated from the heat of 
 the room. But, some one says, the measure- 
 ment is my consciousness, not nature's, nature 
 being unconscious. How can any one back- 
 slide in this way.!* Such a statement may suit 
 the endowment theory, but it is impossible; it 
 is positively wrong. The consciousness that 
 takes me to the thermometer is as much the 
 effect of the heat as the cause of my going, the 
 going itself being only one of the many motions 
 in which the heat of the room has found 
 expression. The hot room, then, to which I 
 belong, reacting on itself, or I as warm react- 
 ing on myself as a function of the room, which 
 is my environment, is all that any one can get 
 out of the process. It is all, I say, but that is 
 a good deal. Through the tension of the 
 reaction the process is a conscious one. I 
 find out something. My experience, or my 
 activity, which has its relation of course to a 
 larger experience or a larger activity, becomes 
 
INDIVIDUALITY. 73 
 
 defined, and in one direction or the other I 
 change the temperature of the room, opening 
 the register or raising a window, or with the 
 same meaning the room changes its own 
 temperature. The definition of experience or 
 activity is always followed by expression of the 
 larger experience or the larger activity, and 
 this, obviously enough, because the larger 
 experience or activity is in the definition. 
 
 But what materialism! What determinism! 
 Only, fortunately, names never condemn. But 
 sometimes their application ends by trans- 
 forming their meaning completely. In an 
 earlier chapter I must have seemed material- 
 istic or deterministic when I virtually denied to 
 Columbus the discovery of America, finding in 
 the voyage of the caravels only his discovery 
 of himself or America's discovery of herself, 
 but that and this are very different indeed 
 from what most understand by those offensive 
 names. The activity of an individual that 
 expresses only what in its own nature it is 
 responsible to, namely, its own relations or its 
 own conditions, may be a determined activity, 
 for responsibility implies determination, but 
 the determination is immanent or essential, 
 not external. It may, too, be a result of a 
 
74 PHIL OSOPH Y OF HIS TOR V. 
 
 ** material" environment, but not unless with 
 as much truth the ''material" environment is 
 also a result of it, the two being functionally 
 related. Or, again, if environment's act is 
 also the agent's act, then both materialism 
 and determinism are transformed. By the 
 deep experience which their application to 
 activity upon this plan brings them they are 
 converted; they are spiritually regenerated. 
 
 Individuals, as relations or organic func- 
 tions or responsible activities, having their 
 reality in and of what they do, in the very 
 fact of their expression serve to define both 
 the process to which they belong and their 
 own positive part in it. Their very activity, 
 their focusing, brings a completer organization 
 and a clearer consciousness both to themselves 
 and to the whole that includes them. More- 
 over, the consciousness that they define and 
 the activity that they express are their con- 
 sciousness and their activity. They have, in 
 other words, a substantial, not a merely for- 
 mal part in what goes on. At first thought it 
 might seem as if under the organic function 
 theory individuals, both in their consciousness 
 and their activity, were hopelessly subjected 
 to the including whole, but this is exactly 
 
INDIVIDUALITY. 75 
 
 what does not happen. The whole is not an 
 including whole, but an organic whole. The 
 consciousness and the activity, therefore, 
 belong neither to the parts nor to the whole, 
 in the sense of either to the exclusion of the 
 other, but are among the parts or intrinsic to 
 the relations of the parts, and so belong to 
 the whole only through and in these relations. 
 The consciousness of the parts is itself the 
 consciousness of the whole and the activity of 
 the parts is itself the activity of the whole. 
 Under the organic function theory a conscious 
 and responsible individuality is a necessity, 
 being as original and as constantly active as 
 unity or wholeness itself. As relations, as 
 responsible activities, individuals have an in- 
 alienable reality. 
 
 We have, then, an individuality that trans- 
 cends any mere bounds of space and time 
 without in any way relieving us of a direct 
 duty to what now is and is now involving us. 
 The endowment theory implied such a trans- 
 cendence too, but only by virtually removing 
 all present and manifest relationships. En- 
 dowment itself was transcendence, but it was 
 also isolation from all the conditions of action 
 and so even from self. Here, however, in the 
 
76 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 individual as an organic function, we have 
 transcendence without alienation or isolation. 
 The individual, instead of being spatially and 
 temporally determined on the one hand and 
 spiritually or immaterially real and immertal 
 on the other, is real and immortal just because 
 a spatial and temporal individual. Of course, 
 in this case the meanings of space and time 
 are changed. The spatial and temporal indi- 
 vidual, being in and of itself more than a local 
 and momentary existence, requires no other 
 separate part in which to secure for itself a 
 permanent reality. Is fatherhood or mother- 
 hood born.? Or does it die.!* Do any of the 
 relations of life, identification with which is 
 just that upon which a real individuality de- 
 pends, either come into being or pass away.? 
 Some time ago, in observing that the indi- 
 vidual is never a new activity, but only a 
 general activity focused, or a force in particu- 
 lar relation or application, we saw that indi- 
 viduals were not born, and it is equally true that 
 they do not pass away. Individual expression 
 and individual consciousness define; they do 
 not create, they do not destroy. Handling, 
 for example, not only precedes but it also sur- 
 vives hands; and so of seeing in relation to 
 
INDIVIDUALITY. 77 
 
 eyes, of hammering to hammers, of kingship 
 to kings, of monetary exchange to money, and 
 of any individual activity, more simple or more 
 complex, to the things or organs with which 
 we identify it. In fine, identify an individual 
 with its activity, seeing in its life and con- 
 sciousness and will and force an actual rela- 
 tionship, a real organic function, and you 
 insure to it an immortality that is as substan- 
 tial and inviolable as the universe itself; a 
 conscious immortality, too, for the activity, in 
 which the life of the individual persists, is ever 
 conscious of its conditions and its consciousness 
 is also the individual's consciousness.* 
 
 But here we come again to the sphere of 
 religion, when our direct concern is not with 
 what our view of the individual may mean to 
 a philosophy of religion, but with what it 
 means to a philosophy of history. To philos- 
 ophy, however, the two are really insepar- 
 able. But for history, or for evolution, the 
 organic function theory of individuality is of 
 an immeasurable importance, since it makes 
 
 * I hardly need to call attention to the consistency of this 
 view of the individual as in its very spatial and temporal 
 character a transcending nature with the view of environment, 
 suggested in the chapter on "Time," as the past and future 
 contemporized with the present. The individual is a function, 
 a relation, of environment. 
 
78 PHILOSOPHV OF HISTORY. 
 
 history real. It offers the only conception of 
 the individual, whether as nation or as man 
 or as event or as any historical phenomenon, 
 --the only conception, upon which a continu- 
 ous, self-consistent history can be established. 
 Institutions and historical phenomena of all 
 sorts can be only the manifested definitions of 
 existing tendencies, since they neither create 
 nor destroy anything. Their definition has 
 the effect merely of liberating for more con- 
 trolled or more organic expression the tenden- 
 cies which they define. And, in particular, 
 the personal characters of history are but the 
 definition, the focused individuation of general 
 but always perfectly real and concrete 
 activities in the social life. They are in the 
 familiar but somewhat misleading phrase 
 already criticized here applications, society's 
 applications as well as their own, of the forces 
 in the social life; and they make the social life, 
 not conscious, but more clearly conscious of 
 itself, and so stimulate a repetition or rather a 
 more vital, a more responsible continuation of 
 their careers in the life that gave them birth 
 only to take them to itself again. 
 
 In chapters that are to follow, notably in the 
 chapter: ''The Great Man," examples of the 
 
INDIVIDUALITY. 79 
 
 historical process, here only generally re- 
 counted, will be given and discussed at some 
 length, but in order at once to make the idea 
 itself quite real, I will mention here perhaps 
 the most striking example of all. In the sim- 
 ple fact, with the meaning suggested by the or- 
 ganic function theory, that Christ lives in 
 Christendom today, the history of the past 
 nineteen, twenty, centuries is made a real his- 
 tory, a history with which we now can directly 
 identify ourselves. Perhaps in its doctrine of 
 the after-life of Christ Christianity itself has 
 had a better philosophy of history than it has 
 been clearly aware of. Certainly and our 
 interest here is primarily historical, not relig- 
 ious, although we have a right to use the ex- 
 periences of religion the living Christ today 
 is not some spirit, external to us that live, but 
 is in and of the life and consciousness that we 
 call ours.* 
 
 *See also my book "Citizenship and Salvation, or Greek 
 and Jew," in which I have undertaken a study of the death 
 of Socrates and the death of Christ from the standpoint de- 
 fined here. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 PROGRESS. 
 
 K low that we have considered in greater or 
 ' ^ in less detail, as the circumstances seemed 
 to require, the character of time and causation 
 and nature and individuality as data of history 
 we should be able to free ourselves from the 
 limitation of our vivisection and find in them 
 all a living whole. We should see the history 
 which they make as something that stands 
 and moves before us. As a living or moving 
 whole, however, they are what commonly we 
 call progress. In progress, then, is the all-in- 
 cluding and all-fulfilling datum of history to 
 which we have at last to turn our attention. 
 
 In our conception of progress there are four 
 principles that are all but axiomatic and that 
 are four only until stated, when they become 
 one. The first of these principles is this: 
 Progress must always be of that which pro- 
 gresses. In other words, to be real or signifi- 
 cant it can be only the expression of an already 
 
PROGRESS. 8i 
 
 immanent and already active nature in that to 
 which it is ascribed. Neither creation nor ac- 
 quisition, neither destruction nor loss can enter 
 into it. It forbids both outgrowth in the sense 
 of complete elimination and genesis in the 
 sense of sudden and wholly novel attainment. 
 For a real and significant progress whatever 
 comes to be is only the responsible, the con- 
 sistent, the organically related expression of 
 what both is and was. Nothing can be here- 
 after that already is not. Nothing is now that 
 was not. Division of labor, to give a single 
 example, is progress, because it neither adds to 
 that in which it occurs nor substracts from it, 
 but only expresses and fulfills it. True, pro- 
 gress has sometimes been predicated of a life 
 that did not belong to and that accordingly 
 was not responsible to that which lived, but 
 only with the effect of turning the predicate 
 into a mere empty name. A progress that is 
 external, irresponsible, arbitrary, is worthless. 
 It is not real. Where were the worth to a 
 child in jumping a brook, if the act were not 
 his .? 
 
 But, secondly, progress can belong only to 
 that which is conscious. Without conscious- 
 ness the responsibility to self, which is neces- 
 
82 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 sary to the real and significant progress of any- 
 thing, is not possible. Consciousness is the 
 medium in which the past and the future of an 
 activity are contemporized with the present 
 and in being this it is what a physical science 
 would call a principle of conservation. Con- 
 servation, however, means responsibility in any 
 process that is subject to it. Hence evolution 
 today, for the sake of its own inner consistency 
 as well as for the interpretation of its observa- 
 tions and discoveries has realized the supreme 
 importance both of identifying life and con- 
 sciousness, or rather of finding each of these 
 intrinsic to the other, and of regarding the two 
 as not local and temporary endowments but 
 essential characters or functions in an indivisi- 
 ble universe. With consciousness an endow- 
 ment the recognized conditions of expression 
 are external to the conscious creature, and this 
 is a fatal separation, but with consciousness 
 the property of an organic universe such a fatal 
 separation is impossible and a responsible fully 
 conserved expression of self, which is a genu- 
 ine progress, is assured. 
 
 And, thirdly, progress depends on individ- 
 uals; on all individuals, however, not on any- 
 one and not on a few; for individuality is noth- 
 
PROGRESS. 83 
 
 in^ more nor less than a condition of conscious- 
 ness. Only through individuals, perhaps the 
 organs of your or my body, perhaps the sepa- 
 rate members or the different classes of society, 
 perhaps even all the manifold manifestations of 
 life, can activity become conscious of itself 
 and of the conditions of its expression. What 
 above was called the focusing of individuals has 
 as its great ofBce the development of a clearer 
 consciousness of self in the activity in which 
 the individual appears. Or, again, the tension 
 of organic relationship, which is consciousness, 
 is also the sole foundation but a very sub- 
 stantial foundation withal since the organic 
 and the real are one of individuality. Not 
 to touch upon more complicated cases in this 
 place, the three individual classes of human 
 society, which contemporize, the first, the past 
 and, the second, the future with the present 
 and at the same time, in the third, do the pe- 
 culiar and immediate tasks shall we say the 
 drudgery.? of the present, I mean in brief the 
 leisured conventionalists, the advanced think- 
 ers, and the workers or laborers in society, 
 show for the social consciousness what the 
 relation between consciousness and individu- 
 ality is, and also how necessary both are to a 
 
84 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 genuine progress. Perhaps, too, some reader 
 will comprehend me here with sufficient clear- 
 ness to find another illustration in the three 
 great realms of the inorganic so-called, the 
 rational or human, and the animate or organic. 
 But, if this second illustration fail, a third and 
 last one is in the relation that every one of us 
 conscious individuals bears to the life as a whole 
 in which we find ourselves. Each of us and 
 it matters not into which social class we may 
 be put, since from one or another point of view 
 each one belongs to all the classes is making 
 society conscious of some detail of its natural 
 responsibility. 
 
 Lastly, progress is neither of individual 
 parts or organs, whether away from each 
 other or away from the whole to which they 
 belong, nor of the whole in the sense of a 
 unity that is external to its parts, but of the 
 whole and the parts as inseparable, of the 
 whole in the expressed relations of the parts, 
 and of the parts in their responsibility to each 
 other or to the unity upon which their individ- 
 uality depends. This is to say, what I think 
 no one after reflection would deny, that coex- 
 isting parts or individuals, whether nations or 
 social classes or persons or particular things 
 
PROGRESS, 85 
 
 or events of any kind, can never be either 
 ahead of their times or behind their times. 
 All that are at any time are present, and pres- 
 ent not merely in the formal condition of 
 time time never is a merely formal condition 
 but also in their nature or character. The 
 evolution of man, for example, has not been a 
 growth out of or away from the primary con- 
 ditions of his existence or * ' origin. ' ' His en- 
 vironment has evolved with him. And social 
 classes, even if opposed, are neither ahead of 
 nor behind each other, their conflict alone 
 being evidence of their contemporaneity. To 
 evolution and conspicuously to history in the 
 narrower sense of human civilization the ma- 
 terial contemporaneity of coexisting individ- 
 uals is a principle whose importance could 
 hardly be overstated. In the light of it con- 
 sider the relation, not only of man to nature, 
 but also of a great genius to his times, of rul- 
 ers to those that are ruled, of the lawless to 
 the law-abiding, of men to women, of capital 
 to labor, and so on without limit. 
 
 But now, apart from these four principles or 
 axioms that underUe a genuine progress and 
 that, put in a single sum, make progress pos- 
 sible only to the activity of an organism or 
 
86 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 to be very tautological to the conscious ac- 
 tivity of a system of different but mutually 
 serving individuals, we may profitably under- 
 take here a somewhat careful analysis of or- 
 ganic activity itself, with the hope of finding 
 still more adequately aud still more positively 
 in just what progress consists. Indeed, so far 
 we have considered chiefly the conditions or 
 limitations of a genuine progress, and now we 
 have to see its possibilities. So far, at least 
 to some, we may even seem to have turned 
 progress into a sheer being what is and stay- 
 ing in statu quo, whereas we need to make 
 sure that no such misinterpretation is the final 
 interpretation. "'^ 
 
 So, to begin the analysis at once, it is ra- 
 tionally necessary as well as empirically true, 
 that activity, that any activity of individual, of 
 society, or of the universe itself, be not the 
 assumption of new relationships, nor escape 
 from old relationships, but the expression and 
 only the expression of existing relationships. 
 The child that jumps the brook only expresses 
 
 *In the analysis that follows my community of thought 
 with Prof. John Dewey, of the University of Chicago, will be 
 evident to any one who has read the third chapter, ** A Gen- 
 eral Study of Conduct," in his Study of Ethics (Ann Arbor, 
 1894.) 
 
PROGRESS. 87 
 
 existing relationships; and, in general, were 
 activity not so conditioned the criticism of 
 causation or change in a former chapter would 
 be meaningless, and we should be, in so far as 
 we have accepted its conclusions, the victims 
 of a fatal deception. As causation must be 
 responsible, not arbitrary, so activity must be 
 only expressive of what is. And, furthermore, 
 the expression of activity always brings a 
 clearer consciousness of its conditions or rela- 
 tions. Activity both has and brings in the 
 sense of more fully defines a consciousness of 
 its conditions, for the tension of the relation- 
 ship expressed, which is consciousness, is es- 
 sential to activity. This truth is very com- 
 monly recognized in popular thought. Action 
 as being a process of self- discovery, as induc- 
 ing its own interpretation, is a very common- 
 place idea, the burden of many sermons and 
 an oft-recurring argument in political speech- 
 es, and the only variation that we are here 
 making upon the popular notion is in our em- 
 phatic contention that the induced conscious- 
 ness is intrinsic to the activity, being as much 
 a condition as a result of it. Action does not 
 induce consciousness in the sense of producing 
 or obtaining something altogether new; it only 
 
88 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 clears or defines the consciousness that has al- 
 ready made the action possible. And this, it 
 is plain, is only another way of repeating that 
 consciousness is not a local and temporal en- 
 dowment but a force or function that mediates 
 among all the incidents of activity. * 
 
 "With a clearer consciousness of its condi- 
 tions activity is thrown into a conflict with it- 
 self. So to speak, the natural tension of its 
 expression is made keener or sharper. The 
 tendency to continue along the old paths con- 
 flicts with the recognized need of meeting the 
 responsibility of the new experience; and this 
 conflict is an unavoidable one because the re- 
 cognized need is no mere future demand, the 
 leap into the future having been taken already 
 by the act itself. So to say, the activity that 
 has already taken place is the future, for it is 
 the source and object of the responsibility. 
 Evidently, too, the conflict that arises in such 
 a way can have no solution except such as will 
 secure for the outgrown activity for we can 
 now call it that also a more definite place in 
 the system of possible acts that make up the 
 agent's repertory, and that when brought to an 
 
 * Compare the principle of relativity in the modern theo- 
 ries of sensation. See also the discussion of the social con- 
 sciousness in chapter vii. 
 
PROGRESS. 89 
 
 organic unity will fully satisfy both the conserv- 
 ative tendency from the past and the demand 
 of the new experience. Elimination of the 
 outgrown activity would only intensify instead 
 of solving the conflict. It would be no more 
 adequate than a literal repetition. Two na- 
 tions go to war and the conflict is plainly one 
 of an already existing social life with itself, 
 and in the outcome both of the contestants 
 change their ways of life, but without necessar- 
 ily losing their individuality. Indeed, they 
 gain in individuality through the more respon- 
 sible expression of it, that is to say, through 
 the more social, the more organic expression 
 of it, that the war induces, and when the war 
 is over the social relation whose expression 
 had made the war necessary is only freer to 
 express itself than before. In like manner, an 
 individual person finds himself opposed by his 
 environment, but again the conflict is of an 
 already expressed activity with itself. Indeed 
 this illustration suggests what is becoming a 
 familiar idea in current thinking. Any con- 
 flict is describable is one of two ways indiffer- 
 ently. It is either of an agent with himself or 
 of the environment with itself. It is, very 
 positively, not of one with the other in the 
 
90 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 meaning of the two as unrelated or only newly 
 related factors. If we see the conflict as of 
 an agent with himself, we recognize in it a 
 thought process; if as of the environment with 
 itself, a physical process; and on the one hand 
 we have deliberation before volition, on the 
 other latent preparation before kinetic mani- 
 festation, but the process is the same in both 
 cases. The agent, although separated, is after 
 all always a part of his own environment; and 
 the environment, although separated, also 
 shares in the relations that are already ex- 
 pressed in the action that brings on the con- 
 flict. 
 
 And, further, the consciousness that neces- 
 sarily accompanies a conflict of this sort, that 
 is both a condition and a result of the inducing 
 activity, can have no goal but the organization 
 of its elements or incidents, these being iden- 
 tical with the conditions of the activity itself. 
 Indeed it is to be kept in mind that the * ' ele- 
 ments ' ' of consciousness, whether viewed as 
 subjective states or objective qualities, are only 
 the relations or conditions of an already 
 expressed activity. In general, then, con- 
 sciousness as thus intimately involved in an ac- 
 tivity that has originally related its subject and 
 
PROGRESS. 9t 
 
 its object would only realize the law of the ac- 
 tivity itself, and it would do this solely that in 
 the law it may have a safe, because a fully sat- 
 isfying motive to the expression of itself. Now 
 a law, sometimes called a concept, is a princi- 
 ple of spatial and temporal determination of 
 the different but related incidents of a process 
 and in exactly this sense it is the natural object 
 or content of consciousness. Only, neither ob- 
 ject nor content is a safe term for use here. 
 The meaning is not by any means that law as 
 some abstract immaterial idea in the under- 
 standing of a psychology that would separate 
 thought and sensation or mind and body is 
 the object or the content of consciousness, but 
 simply and inevitably that consciousness in and 
 of itself is lawful, very much as nature is said 
 to be lawful, the law and the process being one 
 and the same thing. So, in summary, activity 
 which induces a clearer consciousness of its 
 own natural conditions and thereby sharpens 
 the tension of its expression, its conflict with 
 itself, is bound to develop as one of its direct 
 incidents an ever more definitely lawful con- 
 sciousness; or, to look to the other side of the 
 same movement, the conditions of activity, 
 which comprise what we find can be called the 
 
gi PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 object of consciousness not without danger of 
 serious misunderstanding, develop into a law- 
 ful environment; and with this development, 
 whether of a lawful consciousness or of a law- 
 ful environment, the existing conflict ap- 
 proaches its solution in, not a new, but a freer 
 expression of the original and ever-persisting 
 activity. Moreover freer expression is just 
 that in which progress consists. 
 
 Illustrations are not wanting. In chapters to 
 follow this we shall find the evolution of hu- 
 man society, in short the history of civilization, 
 to be true to the analysis of activity in general 
 that has been given, but in this place I may 
 appeal for illustration only to such activities as 
 dealing an accurate blow, conducting a politi- 
 cal campaign, building a house, or writing a 
 book. In each of these the consciousness 
 that accompanies the process first is always 
 both a condition and a result of the process, 
 and second is neither subjective nor objec- 
 tive because both subjective and objective or 
 rather because only the tension of an existing 
 organic relationship between subject and ob- 
 ject, and third is the liberation of the pro- 
 cess in its own realized lawfulness. 
 
 The liberation of activity, then, in its own 
 
PROGRESS. 93 
 
 realized lawfulness is our formula for progress. 
 But law, which is a term that can be applied 
 indifferently to consciousness and to environ- 
 ment, to mind and to matter, just by dint of 
 its serving to determine the organic relations 
 of all of the details or incidents of activity or 
 and this is the same thing of all of the 
 possible activities in an agent's repertory, has 
 a distinctly timeless character, being that in 
 which to recall a now familiar phrase the 
 future and the past are contemporized with the 
 present. We may, therefore, in open recog- 
 nition of this function of law reword our for- 
 mula of progress as follows: 
 
 Progress is the timeless'*' because defining 
 and contemporizing law of the past, whether 
 as thought or as environment, becoming the 
 motive, which is only the defined and contem- 
 porized future, of the present. 
 
 And progress is the all-including and all-ful- 
 filling datum of history. Progress is history. 
 
 Timeless, of course, in the sense that refers only to a ful- 
 filment of the temporal, not to anything outside of the tem- 
 poral. 
 
Parr II. 
 SOCIETY AND SOCIAL CHANGE. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE GROUP IN GENERAL. , 
 
 I T IS hardly necessary to say that society as 
 well as individuality or any of the other 
 things considered in the foregoing chapters is 
 a datum of history, but also it is hardly nec- 
 essary to say that thought progresses only by 
 changing its standpoint and its machinery. In 
 this second part of our present study it is as if 
 we were too near to history itself, to its life 
 and our identity with it to speak of mere data 
 of history. Society and social change are his- 
 tory itself. With them we are ever identify- 
 ing the progress that we have found history to 
 be. Political science, the science of social 
 life, and history are considered nowadays as 
 one and the same thing. 
 
 But our idea of society must not be superfi- 
 cial. It must be consistent with our idea of 
 the group in general, just as in considering in- 
 dividuality we felt obliged to think of atoms as 
 well as of persons. Human society is a group 
 of individuals and in the group as such there 
 
98 PHIL O SO PHY OF HIS TOR Y. 
 
 are certain characteristics that it is well to no- 
 tice, so to speak, without any political preju- 
 dices. 
 
 So, to begin with, any group is a more or 
 less definitely organized manifold of different 
 individuals. This is to say that a group is a 
 differentiated whole whose differences con- 
 tribute to or are identical with its unity. A 
 chair, for example, is a group of many things, 
 but even such of the parts as the legs or the 
 rounds that seem ahke in themselves are all 
 different as parts of the chair. A circle is a 
 group of a number of arcs or of a number of 
 course an infinite number of points that in 
 themselves are all alike but in the circle differ- 
 ent, the unity or integrity of the circle re- 
 quiring their perfect differentiation. The tenth 
 dollar in a sum of ten dollars is different from 
 the ninth or the eighth, because ten dollars as 
 a group will satisfy a different interest from 
 that which nine or eight would satisfy. The 
 family circle, the nations of the earth, the ob- 
 jects in a room, the heavenly bodies, are all 
 groups of which the principle, stated above, 
 that unity and differences are inseparable, is 
 irrefutably true. Things in general, if seen 
 as many are different and if seen as different 
 
THE GROUP IN GENERAL. 99 
 
 are related as the members of some group. 
 Not that the relation, the organization of the 
 differences is always altogether definite, but 
 simply that the fact itself of an organic differ- 
 entiation is essential to any group. 
 
 Any group, then, is a group with parts or 
 members that are the related means to some 
 one end or with differences that co-operate in 
 some one function or activity. On any other 
 assumption the inseparableness of the unity 
 and the differences would be meaningless, 
 since only in the adaptation of means to end 
 is unity made to be intrinsic to differences. 
 But why posit an end as a function or activ- 
 ity? Because a group whose differences are 
 also its unity must always be more than a 
 formal composition, and because only its im- 
 plication in an activity can make it more. In 
 itself it must be essentially dynamic. What 
 holds a chair together but gravity.? Gravity, 
 then, is the process to which the chair is a 
 means. True, somebody of a very practical 
 turn may say that the chair is held together 
 because it is something to sit in, but sitting is 
 only one of many other adaptations on the 
 part of living creatures to the force of gravity. 
 So, in general, the end to which any group is 
 
loo PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 a means is a positive activity which the group's 
 differential unity both belongs to and shares 
 in. I say ' ' shares in, ' ' for I think no one 
 would deny of the chair to return to that 
 that its parts exercise the force of gravity as 
 well as adjust themselves to it. 
 
 But a group to which activity is essential, 
 a group that in itself is dynamic, being the 
 immanently active expression of unity in differ- 
 ences or of differences in unity, is an organ- 
 ism. Is this to say that any group lives? It 
 certainly is, but not on the endowment plan. 
 It is to recognize in every group a tension. 
 The tension is between the group's own local 
 and momentary existence and the larger activ- 
 ity in which the group shares and to which the 
 group is a means. Thus, the chair lives 
 through the fact of its being in a tension with 
 gravity as a universe force. Gravity both 
 holds it together and in course of time de- 
 stroys or disintegrates it. The chair, or any 
 other group, in this way may be said to live its 
 own death. It lives its own death, just be- 
 cause it is a group and as a group is respon- 
 sible intensively to itself and extensively* to 
 the force to which it owes its existence. Our 
 
 * Except that the extensive is always only the more inten- 
 sive. 
 
THE GROUP IN GENERAL. loi 
 
 friend of the practical turn would no doubt 
 express the same idea by saying that chairs 
 have come and gone, new and different and 
 perhaps better chairs arising to take their 
 place, for the simple reason that the activity 
 of sitting, which brought them into life, for 
 the sake of its own more adequate expression 
 has required also that they should pass away. 
 Gravity, however, to which sitting is an adap- 
 tation, is not life is it? Perhaps not, al- 
 though gravity has something to do with the 
 conservation of an organic universe. Sitting 
 is not life either, but it is quite in order to sug- 
 gest that living creatures sometimes sit and, as 
 indicated before, in doing so are not merely 
 adapting themselves to gravity but also identi- 
 fying themselves with it. Too often we for- 
 get do we not? that adaptation is always 
 identification, that the conditions of any activ- 
 ity always share positively in the activity. 
 Should we remember this at all times, some 
 unnaturally difficult problems would turn as 
 unnaturally simple. 
 
 And in any case the group as a group and 
 this means any group is an organism, active 
 and alive and responsible, but to repeat not 
 on the endowment plan. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE HUMAN GROUP OR SOCIETY. 
 
 nr HE human group or society is also an 
 ' organism, active and alive and responsi- 
 ble but not on the endowment plan. 
 
 From a chair to society ! This is a jump 
 indeed, and I know too well that there are 
 many who will promptly refuse to take it even 
 with the help of such a profound insight into 
 the nature of any group as was reached in the 
 previous chapter ! Still I do not despair of 
 getting even the most cautious of jumpers 
 across the awful chasm, although to get them 
 over I shall probably have to do more than 
 suggest to them that chairs as well as gravity 
 have played their part and are still playing 
 their part in the life and consciousness of a 
 sometimes sedentary human society. This sug- 
 gestion, however, should not be dismissed as 
 altogether impertinent. 
 
 Of course at the present time the organic 
 character of society is a much discussed ques- 
 
THE HUMAN GROUP OR SOCIETY. 103 
 
 tion, and as is usual in such cases the discus- 
 sion implies an ignorance, an incomplete 
 knowledge, of the things discussed. To under- 
 stand anything is to have to limit it to nothing, 
 to find in it a universe- truth. To say that 
 society is not an organism and that some 
 individual mass is an organism is not yet to 
 know just what an organism really is. But 
 you remind me that most if not all thinkers 
 ,today admit the organic character of society. 
 They do not, however, admit it unqualifiedly, 
 and their qualifications show that the term is 
 so imperfectly understood that it is in their 
 thinking at war with itself, meaning two things 
 instead of only one. Society, they say, is an 
 organism, but not as the individual is an 
 organism. It is an organism only ideally, or 
 only spiritually, or only psychologically, or 
 only physically, and so on, with some rhyme 
 possibly but not much reason. The term 
 * ' only, ' ' like fire, is very useful when controlled 
 but very dangerous to play with. 
 
 Herbert Spencer is a case in hand. He is 
 willing to apply to society the name organism, 
 but not without qualification, not to the detri- 
 ment of his individualism; and in consequence 
 his individuals lose their own organic character. 
 
I04 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 Let us see how this is. He draws analogies 
 between the organism the living individual of 
 biology and society, but also he discovers 
 points of difference that qualify the organic 
 character of society almost out of existence. 
 Thus, society and the organism are alike in 
 that their growth brings increase in mass, 
 increase in complexity of structure, and in- 
 crease in the interdependence of parts, and in 
 that the whole has permanence although the 
 parts die, but different in that society as 
 society, unlike the organism, has no distinct 
 form, no continuous tissue and no local con- 
 sciousness, all its parts or members being con- 
 scious, and in that the parts of society, unlike 
 those of the organism, are free to move 
 autonomously. But here is a lot of false- 
 hoods or at least a lot of statements that are 
 flagrantly superficial. The organism, even the 
 individual organism, is not what Spencer says 
 it is in so many words. Mass as mass has 
 nothing to do with organic character, nor has 
 mere complexity, and the whole that is really 
 permanent is not something that can even for 
 a moment be separated from its parts, and if 
 the real organism, the individual organism, has 
 such a distinct form, why is biology still busy 
 
THE HUMAN GROUP OR SOCIETY. 105 
 
 over her microscopes ? Can the naked eye be 
 trusted in the case of society when it is not 
 trusted in that of the individual ? And who 
 has ever seen real continuity ? Visible con- 
 tinuity in itself does not make or unmake an 
 organism, since the only final test of continuity 
 is in expressed relationship. In Spencer's 
 sense even protoplasm is not continuous. 
 Furthermore, in regard to the matter of con- 
 sciousness, the individual organism as well as 
 society is conscious in all of its members. In 
 other words sensation, or consciousness gen- 
 erally, is a function of the individual as a 
 whole, not the*special action or condition of 
 certain separate organs. And, to conclude 
 this arraignment of Spencer's idea of the 
 organism, the parts of the individual have in 
 reality as much autonomy as the members of 
 society. A difference in degree there may be 
 between the freedom in the one case and the 
 freedom in the other, but such difference in- 
 stead of denying the principle that is involved 
 only asserts it. Only when the members of 
 society are free autonomously to move through 
 each other or through walls and to lift them- 
 selves by their boot-straps and do other things 
 in violation of the organizing unity of their 
 
io6 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 universe, only then can I find their freedom, 
 their individualism, different in kind from that 
 of the parts of my own body or of any other 
 living mass. 
 
 But Spencer can be met also on his own 
 ground. His standpoint is a physical one, and 
 physical science, looking at the life of society, 
 at the body in which that life is expressed, has 
 no trouble at all in finding massiveness, con- 
 tinuity, localization, and restraint or confine- 
 ment of individuals, which Spencer would 
 make the criteria of organic character, in 
 society. Society, then, as Spencer himself 
 uses the term, is as organic as anything else. 
 Spencer seems to me like a man who has 
 pushed his fingers up through a hole in a sheet 
 of paper and looking at them argues to indi- 
 vidualism from their apparent isolation and 
 autonomous wriggling. But you object to 
 such a comparison ? The fingers, you grant, 
 are not really detached, but the members of 
 society are. Detached, perhaps; but in any 
 case not unrelated. Stones, too, are detached, 
 but for the sake of an organizing natural law, 
 not in spite of it. 
 
 Spencer's case is altogether a typical one. 
 Spencer, like many others, although he passes 
 
THE HUMAN GROUP OR SOCIETY. 107 
 
 as an evolutionist, is not enough of an evolu- 
 tionist to identify human life with the nature 
 from v^hich it is supposed to have sprung. He 
 makes the nature of man something by itself. 
 Like the other forms of life, with which he 
 deals, man is not seen as in himself already 
 adapted to the presented conditions of human 
 activity. Witness the negative, the irrational 
 element in environment, which Spencer calls 
 the Unknowable and which can not but have 
 the effect of separating man from himself or 
 as the same thing from the conditions of his 
 life. But to divide man, to make the living 
 man and the material man, or the spiritual 
 man, two separate creatures instead of one 
 creature is at once to put the organism, 
 whether individual or social, wholly out of the 
 question. An organism lives the life of its 
 environment. With conditions external in 
 their nature it can have nothing to do; or, if 
 it does relate itself to them, it can be seen 
 only as Spencer sees it, namely, in terms of 
 massiveness, continuity, localization, restraint 
 of its members, and so on, and this is to say 
 that it is not really seen at all. And, as with 
 Spencer's, so with anybody's division of human 
 nature. It puts a real organic character. 
 
I08 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 whether of individual or of society, wholly 
 out of the question. The concept of the 
 organism, like that of evolution to which it 
 belongs, depends on the unity of all the phases 
 of life, of the physical and the animate and 
 the rational and the spiritual, and sociologists 
 or political scientists of any kind, who would 
 deny organic character to society or who 
 would in any of the many ways qualify their 
 admission of the term organism would do well, 
 of course in the first place to discover if they 
 really know what an individual organism as 
 an organism is, but especially in the second 
 place to determine what their particular divis- 
 ion of human nature is and how far they are 
 seriously willing to make it. If human nature 
 is indivisible, if there is only one man in any 
 of us, then as individuals or as society . or as 
 either in the other we are living the life of the 
 conditions of our life and this is but to say 
 that we are living a strictly organic life. Fully 
 to realize this organic life we must expect to 
 have to go deeper, to look deeper, than human 
 natu.e, for just the reason suggested. Human 
 nature is more than, it is alwaj^s deeper than 
 itself. The universe is in it. And for us, who 
 are in search of a real principle and accord- 
 
THE HUMAN GROUP OR SOCIETY. 109 
 
 ingly can not stop with anything short of a 
 real principle, no depths can be too deep. 
 
 Society, then, as a group of human beings 
 whose nature is one nature and is one with all 
 nature, is Kke any group; it is an organism. 
 Wherever the members of any group are 
 obliged to adjust themselves to each other and 
 to their environment in the interests of an 
 all-controlling, all-including law or process, be 
 the law or the process physical as in the case 
 of gravity or psychical or spiritual or of any 
 other character you like, they comprise in their 
 nature and activity what is essentially an or- 
 ganism. 
 
 And an organic society, furthermore, has 
 both a social consciousness and a social will. 
 
 Evidences of a social consciousness are in 
 the fact of a common environment; in the fact, 
 if not of a common language, at least of dif- 
 ferent languages that are translatable more or 
 less easily; in the fact of such social institu- 
 tions as the state, the church, the school, and 
 the factory; and in the fact of all the different 
 means of intercourse, the instruments of com- 
 munication and of transportation and the like. 
 These evidences, moreover, are all reducible 
 to one, to the simple fact of the community of 
 
1 1 o PHIL O SO PHY OF HIS TOR Y. 
 
 nature in all men and the community of man 
 with all nature. Psychologist and political 
 scientist at the present time are coming to look 
 upon environment, the object or the content of 
 consciousness, as the central, the organizing 
 unity of all the different means to a social lif ^. 
 They see it as the social institution of all social 
 institutions, as the whole of which language 
 and the other things that were mentioned are 
 but special differentiated expressions or rela- 
 tions. 
 
 But one's view of the nature of the social 
 consciousness will depend very naturally on 
 what one supposes the relation to environment 
 to be. To speak strictly, the unity of all the 
 different means to a social life in environment 
 is not a possible idea without a clear apprecia- 
 ciation of the unity of human nature and of 
 man with all nature, but we may neglect this 
 necessity of thought and consider, as if they 
 were equally possible, the two cases of those, 
 first, who would separate man from some or 
 all of the conditions of his life or aspects of 
 his environment and, second, who would 
 recognize positively and directly the unity of 
 man and the sphere in which he lives. In the 
 first case, the case of the separation, as has 
 
THE HUMAN GROUP OR SOCIETY. iii 
 
 been pointed out already, neither society as 
 society nor its members as individuals can be 
 supposed to have a genuinely organic charac- 
 ter; and, as to consciousness, this, in the indi- 
 viduals is a mere endowment or God-sent 
 when not devil-sent gift and in society an 
 equally although more obviously arbitrary or 
 irrational and so unreal possession. The indi- 
 vidual is conscious, but the consciousness is not 
 his; and the consciousness of society is exter- 
 nal to the humanity of society, being ' * given, ' ' 
 infallible, and referred to a language and a 
 system of other institutions that are as dead to 
 those who use them, as brutally fixed and as 
 intellectually empty, as the external environ- 
 ment in general to which they belong, and that 
 serve therefore either to reduce the members 
 of society to a lifeless level or which in effect 
 is the same thing to create inviolable differ- 
 ences among them or among the classes into 
 which they may be divided. 
 
 Subjectively consciousness as an endowment 
 is always localized or enthroned in some par- 
 ticular member or members, and at first 
 thought it seems strange that those who have 
 separated man from the sphere of his life and 
 have given certain of man's parts an arbitrary 
 
1 1 2 PHIL O SO PHY OF HIS TOR Y. 
 
 right to his consciousness should have denied 
 a local habitation and sometimes even a name 
 to the social consciousness. What does an 
 absolute monarchy or an infallible papacy or 
 an arbitrary individual leadership of any kind 
 mean but a social consciousness that is at once 
 an endowment and a localized function ? Is a 
 ruling individual or possibly a ruling class 
 any less real or any less local or any less arbi- 
 trary in the thought or consciousness that it 
 exercises than the brain or than a group of 
 special sense-organs ? Given a monarchical or 
 a feudalistic psychology, and you get also a 
 monarchial or a feudalistic politics; and yet the 
 advocates of the former find the social con- 
 sciousness in the latter a mere abstraction. 
 This, I have said, seems strange, but after all 
 the case is the same as that of Spencer's organ- 
 ism, which was denied to society but affirmed 
 of the individual, and just because it was not 
 a genuine organism at all. Consciousness on 
 the localized endowment plan is not conscious- 
 ness but unconsciousness or mere physical 
 quality. It appears to be one of the offices of 
 the life and nature of society to reveal to the 
 individual his erroneous views of himself. 
 Above Spencer's inorganic society exposed his 
 
THE HUMAN GROUP OR SOCIETY. 113 
 
 individual organism, and here an unconscious 
 society has exposed a conscious, a selfishly 
 conscious individual. 
 
 So, almost in spite of ourselves, we are 
 brought to our second case, the case of those 
 who would recognize positively and directly 
 the unity of man and the sphere in which he 
 lives. For these both individual and society 
 are organic and consciousness, at once indi- 
 vidual and social, is in and of the life itself 
 that the organism expresses, being as truly a 
 condition as a consequence of it, and is referred 
 to a language and to other institutions that are 
 themselves vital incidents of it and grow con- 
 sistently with it, serving neither to level nor to 
 separate individuals or classes, but to unite 
 them by sanctioning and mediating their pecu- 
 liar differences. Environment, the unity of 
 all the means to a social life and thought, is 
 looked upon and is to be resorted to as the 
 great mediator of differences, and language, 
 as only a very highly developed relation to en- 
 vironment, can no longer serve, or be imag- 
 ined to serve, as a medium of universally valid 
 truths, a repository of dogmas, but only, so to 
 speak, as a tertium quid in which individuals 
 can agree to differ. The days are past when 
 
114 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 men can think in chorus. They have gone 
 with the days of the immutable species and 
 irresponsible individual. 
 
 Not for a moment can anybody conclude 
 from what has been said that there are two 
 consciousnesses, an individual consciousness 
 and a social consciousness. The conscious 
 individual is in himself socially conscious and 
 the conscious society is in itself a society of 
 conscious individuals. 
 
 But, objects somebody, this is all very well; 
 only it fails to account for that undoubtable 
 * * public opinion, ' ' which belongs to nobody, 
 and yet the searching eye of which is felt by 
 everybody. * * Public opinion ' ' has standards, 
 I am reminded, that are at least relatively 
 fixed and arbitrary or irrational. Well, I can 
 only say in reply to this, what I think is in- 
 controvertible, that the objector, in so far as 
 he finds ' ' public opinion ' ' fixed and irrational, 
 is identifying it with phrases or customs or 
 institutions. These, however, do not repre- 
 sent the real public opinion; they are dying 
 creatures when not mature wholly unsubstan- 
 tial ghosts. In just so far as opinion becomes 
 public and fixed, it loses its authority in con- 
 sciousness. The mere machinery of the social 
 
THE HUMAN GROUP OR SOCIETY. 115 
 
 life is not its consciousness. Sometimes it 
 may seem to be, but every one knows that it 
 is not. At a ' ' function, ' ' what but ' * pubHc 
 opinion" and its commonplaces ever finds 
 expression, but how truly every one is think- 
 ing of what he does not hear and of what he 
 does not say! No wonder that those who 
 would identify the social consciousness with 
 society's conventionalities can see it only as 
 vague or abstract, as purely spiritual in the 
 sense of external and unreal. 
 
 But the true nature of the social conscious- 
 ness will be still more clearly understood by 
 us when we have seen in just what the social 
 will consists. Political scientists have fallen 
 into the habit of saying that the state must not 
 be identified with the government, and this 
 seems to me to be only their way, or one of 
 their ways, of saying, what has been said 
 above,' that the social consciousness must not 
 be identified with the mere machinery of the 
 social life, and what is now to be said, that the 
 social will must not be identified merely with 
 the visible law or authority. If the will and 
 the visible authority are identified, then the 
 will becomes the interest or motive of an 
 abstractly universal nature rather than the 
 
Il6 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 interest or motive of either society as society 
 or any of its particular members. Such a will 
 is a purely common will or by a strange but 
 thoroughly logical connection between the 
 opposites the separate wills of wholly unre- 
 lated individuals. It need hardly be said that 
 the divisibility of the social will and the much 
 discussed divisibility of sovereignty are one 
 and the same problem. 
 
 Make the social will a strictly common will 
 and you get in return only the most extreme 
 individualism in the social life, for the com- 
 mon will that is responsible to no interests of 
 its own is bound to relate itself to the interests 
 of anybody and everybody. Thomas Hobbes 
 and even Rousseau or perhaps Rousseau 
 more clearly than anybody else found a com- 
 mon social will and absolute individualism the 
 two sides of one and the same truth. 
 
 The social will, however, if social because 
 common, can be nobody's will; and, if will 
 simply that it may be somebody's, can not be 
 social. To separate the will of society either 
 in the way of an absolute monarchy or in the 
 way of a purely individualistic democracy, is 
 to lose sight of the true nature of will itself or 
 of the true nature of both society and its 
 
THE HUMAN GROUP OR SOCIETY. 117 
 
 members. Will is net a something that con- 
 trols life from without, just as society and 
 individuality, as the two recognized sources of 
 control, are not external to each other. Will 
 and life, whether the life of the individual or 
 the life of society, are one and the same 
 thing. The natural, immanent, self-deter- 
 mined compulsion of what is already active at 
 any time and place is the only will, the only 
 social will, that we can be serious about. Is 
 the will of society, forsooth, different from 
 that of a mother with her child, or of a runner 
 in a race, or of a machinist at his work.? Vol- 
 untary acts, individual and social, are only 
 justifications of actual conditions, the fulfil- 
 ments of existing activities, or suppose we say 
 almost technically the reactions of adapted 
 structures on their sympathetic environments. 
 Society, then, being an organism, and the 
 social consciousness being social only because 
 individual and individual only because social, 
 the social will can have no reality except as 
 the expression of the existing social life, the 
 maintenance of the organic unity of individual 
 interests or relations. The truly social will is 
 of such a nature that it is a necessity inherent 
 in the individual will. It is, in short, the ten- 
 sion of a social individuality. 
 
1 1 8 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTOR Y. 
 
 A single conclusion from this account of the 
 will of society will serve to illustrate it. Thus, 
 if the will of society is what we say it is, then 
 we should be able to show definitely that the 
 act of any individual not only is the act of 
 society but also is recognized by society as its 
 own. This, however, in both of its counts, 
 can be shown very easily; and I take the most 
 unfavorable case available. What criminal 
 ever does his own crime alone.? Nay, who are 
 his accomplices but those who, although living 
 in the law, have induced his act by helping to 
 make it possible.-* The social life in which a 
 crime is possible is not determined by the 
 criminal any more than it is determined by his 
 accusers. His act, then, is their act; his com- 
 mission, their omission. The mere machinery 
 of the social life is that in which crime and 
 lawfulness act hand in hand. And society 
 knows this; society constantly recognizes it. 
 Just as no parent punishes his child without 
 feeling that he should himself receive the pun- 
 ishment, or rather without actually receiving 
 it in some way, direct or indirect, so society 
 takes her revenge on the transgressor only to 
 suffer herself and to realize that his act was 
 as much hers as his. Human history is but a 
 
THE HUMAN GROUP OR SOCIETY. 119 
 
 startling record of the awakened self-convict- 
 ing consciousness of those who have con- 
 demned their fellows, and their awakening, 
 moreover, has somehow always been as much 
 the cause as the consequence of the condemna- 
 tion. Not that any offense is to be supposed 
 any less offensive or any offender any less 
 responsible in the light of this history, but 
 from the fact that society shares in the offenses 
 of her members no offense is either wholly 
 unpardonable or wholly invaluable. In the 
 phrases of religion the conviction of sin is both 
 forgiving and saving. In their crimes, then, 
 as well as in their lawful deeds, the members 
 of society are servants both of their own lives 
 and of the social life to which they belong. 
 As was indeed said here many pages back, 
 individuality has its only reality in a process 
 by which life becomes conscious of its own 
 conditions. 
 
 So, in summary of this chapter, the human 
 group or society is an organism; it is con- 
 scious in its individuals; and it has a will that 
 is not common, that is not divided, but is the 
 compulsion inherent in the single activity of its 
 individual members. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE DOUBLE RESPONSIBILITY OF SOCIETY. 
 
 I IKE the chair or Hke any group society 
 ^ lives its own death; for society, any so- 
 ciety, has a responsibihty that is at once in- 
 tensive and extensive, at once to its own 
 manifest Hfe and to nature* as a whole, and 
 sooner or later under the tension of this 
 double responsibility it can not but outgrow 
 itself. 
 
 In positive history, to which we are now 
 ready to turn with a directness that has not 
 been possible before or rather that has not 
 been as apparent as it can now become, any 
 particular society is particular by virtue of a 
 domain, a consciousness of a past, and a dis- 
 tinct activity. Only in proportion as it has 
 these is it separated from nature. Its pecu- 
 liarity, it is true, or the separation is often ex- 
 plained by reference to geographical condi- 
 
 * I say nature here and in other places, because the term is 
 so inclusive. Nature includes not only other societies but also 
 other manifestations of life in general, and it includes besides 
 the deeper and undiscovered or only partially discovered life 
 of the society itself that finds it external. 
 
RESPONSIBILITY OF SOCIETY. 121 
 
 tions or to other physical conditions and some- 
 times by reference to a divine guidance, but in 
 the special meanings usually intended neither 
 of these references can be allowed here. The 
 determination can not come from without, 
 whether from a designing God or from an ex- 
 ternal nature. Peculiar environing conditions 
 can not of themselves be said to make pecu- 
 liar societies when human nature is in itself as 
 broad and as deep as the whole to which it 
 belongs, when man and nature or nature and 
 man are one. Moreover and this comes 
 near to being only the converse of what has 
 just been said for a society to have become 
 peculiar or individual, for it to have become 
 separated from nature, is for it also to have 
 transcended itself, to have come into a con- 
 flict that is indifferently describable as with 
 nature or with itself. Has it a certain terri- 
 tory.? The boundaries were drawn only to de- 
 fine a developed and recognized relation to 
 the life beyond them. Has it a treasured 
 past.? It has begun to realize that it sprang 
 from a life that was before it was.? Or has it 
 a special and consciously conducted pursuit 
 such as agriculture, or herding, or commerce, 
 or anything else you like.? The pursuit has an 
 
1 22 PHIL O SOPHY OF HIS TOR Y. 
 
 already appreciated, an already determining 
 relation to the other activities of nature's life. 
 Thus, in any one of the three ways, in which 
 we can see the isolation of a society, the limit 
 is set only as it is transcended. Consider how 
 merely in becoming Greek the Greek people 
 entered into an ever strengthening, not a 
 weakening relation to the Barbarians; and, 
 similarly, the Jewish people to the Gentiles; 
 and we American people to the peoples east 
 and west, north and south of our national 
 borders. 
 
 A peculiar society, then, is not really an 
 isolated society, and in expressing itself it is 
 bound to maintain both sides of its responsi- 
 bility. It can not escape the conflict with its 
 own individuality. To the casual observer 
 expression of self might be expected only to 
 intensify an original isolation, but casual ob- 
 servation is not to be trusted, for expression 
 even while intensifying not an original isola- 
 tion but an original individuality is also affirm- 
 ing ever more directly, ever more positively 
 the relation between the individual and what 
 is without. This is almost paradoxical, and 
 yet what thoughtful historian has ever failed 
 to recognize that throughout the course of his- 
 
RESPONSIBILITY OF SOCIETY. 123 
 
 tory the conquerors and the conquered in any 
 struggle have shared with each other both 
 their victory and their defeat? But let us see 
 for ourselves. 
 
 There can be no doubt that whenever a 
 society awakens to a sense of its own import- 
 ance and so to a sense of its opposition to the 
 life without it enters upon a more intense 
 expression of itself, and this would seem to 
 lead to a growing separation instead of to 
 a growing identification of the inner and 
 the outer, but a result must always be 
 true to its origin and in the case in hand the 
 origin is as internal to the society involved as it 
 is external. The awakening and the opposition 
 are due as much to a motive at home as to a 
 stimulus abroad. The story, I say, is the 
 same as that of the chair, which gravity holds 
 together and which gravity destroys. The 
 people themselves have done something to 
 make the conflict, not the conflict comes 
 as if out of a clear sky; and the more intense 
 the ensuing self-expression becomes the more 
 truly does the society come into a recognized 
 conflict with itself and so even invite attack 
 from without. Indeed, in ways that are start- 
 ling when first observed, a society that inten- 
 
124 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 sifies its own individuality, that would even 
 isolate itself, does but co-operate with its op- 
 ponents in bringing about some kind of a rev- 
 olution in its own life, and the strange co-opera- 
 tion although for a time held from view is not 
 by any means unseen from the beginning and 
 in the end it comes to be more or less directly 
 and openly avowed. Intensification of indi- 
 viduality implies does it not? the mere 
 cultivation of one's peculiar life, a living in 
 one's own way simply for the sake of living in 
 one's own way, and upon this plan, upon the 
 plan that turns life into a cult, formalism and 
 disintegration are sure to ensue. 
 
 But, again, a people finds itself confronted 
 with a great war, a great danger. So great is 
 the danger that an invasion may be threat- 
 ened. And who brought on the war.** So far 
 as I know, no honest historian has ever exon- 
 erated either of the parties to a war. A war 
 springs out of the expression of some vital 
 relation between the contestants, out of a 
 community of nature, out of some common 
 interest. An approaching enemy, moreover, 
 even when barbarian or wholly uncivilized, is 
 sure to bring the reproach of a forgotten past, 
 the call to a neglected duty; is sure to arouse 
 
RESPONSIBILITY OF SOCIETY. 125 
 
 a dormant conscience. Should the hosts of 
 China come against us today, just this would 
 be true of their coming; and just this was very 
 true when Xerxes and the others moved upon 
 Greece. And how does a war affect a people.^ 
 It affects them exactly as any activity that they 
 feel responsible for has to affect them. It 
 affects them exactly as reproval, sense of neg- 
 lect, and aroused conscience are always eifec- 
 tive. They get bravery.? Yes, and also 
 bravado. Strength } And conceit. Unity .? 
 And discord. Patriotism? And treachery. 
 Was ever a war that did not bring both the 
 one and the other of these things? 
 
 War, then, which is as much a conflict with 
 self as with an enemy without, which rises as 
 individuality arises, and is indeed only indi- 
 viduality's conflict with itself, exhibits to us a 
 process by which a society may be said to be 
 put beside itself, or to be alienated from itself. 
 From its very inception war casts discredit on 
 the life of the people by making them, as never 
 before, conscious of what they are doing. The 
 life, although discredited, may long continue, 
 but ever more and more for appearance's sake 
 only. The common cause that the war makes 
 is weakening to all the personal and sectional 
 
126 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 differences upon which the society has always 
 depended, and it serves accordingly to make 
 the people external to their own activity, or, 
 as said above, to alienate the society from 
 itself. The more definite consciousness of 
 what they have been doing comes with a de- 
 crease in the sense of responsibility to it. In 
 short, from its very inception, a war brings 
 with it into the life of the people an ever 
 strengthening undercurrent of what is, sooner 
 or later, recognized as cosmopolitanism, or 
 world-wide interest, and in the end an entire 
 civilization may be swept away thereby. And 
 if a world-wide interest is what induces the 
 war, what other outcome should be expected 
 than just this of a more clearly defined world- 
 wide interest. War, like conflict in general, 
 is only the definition of activity. 
 
 Hereafter we shall have to follow the pro- 
 cess of society's alienation from itself, in con- 
 siderable detail, but for the present the process 
 itself, as we have it, suggests to us a way of 
 reducing the activity of a society, in which it 
 meets its double responsibility, to certain 
 stages. First, there is the stage of society's 
 at-one-ness with self; second, of its complete 
 alienation from self; and, third, of its restora- 
 
RESPONSIBILITY OF SOCIETY. 127 
 
 tion to self. Of course, of the third stage we 
 have not yet seen anything except by impHca- 
 tion, but its general nature is evident enough. 
 In positive history the three are marks of the 
 orient that was, the Occident that is, and the 
 reunion of the two that not yet is; or, within 
 narrower limits, of the Greek life that was, the 
 Roman life that was and still is, and the Chris- 
 tian or European-American that is or is 
 coming to be; or, still more narrowly, of the 
 colonial life in our own history, the period of 
 sectionalism have we passed it yet.? and the 
 future to which we look and which even now 
 we think we see. 
 
 These stages, then, are our next concern. 
 To begin with, we shall define them somewhat 
 fully, each for itself, and in its relation to the 
 others; and then having, as it were, deter- 
 mined our landmarks, we shall give special 
 attention to the transitions, to the alienation 
 as a process that is teeming with important 
 details and to the restoration that is not less 
 important to us and that is indeed the process 
 in which we are likely to see the life of our 
 own time. 
 
 But before we turn to these new interests 
 there is something that should be said, by way 
 
1 28 PHTL O SOPHY OF HIS TOR V. 
 
 of caution, of this reduction of a process to its 
 stages. Thus, in the first place, a series of 
 stages must always be somewhat schematic. 
 The three stages of a society's activity are all 
 of them, even the second one, extremes. Ex- 
 tremes, however, are never found in real life, 
 and when we think of them they are significant 
 only for the principle which they embody, only 
 for the activity which they abstractly define. 
 Sometimes we describe a curve by its stages. 
 Thus, we say it begins here; it reaches a max- 
 imum or minimum here; and it ends here; and 
 these stages appear to us different even in 
 kind; but they are only the terms of a relation- 
 ship expressed in what is a perfectly uniform 
 process. As with a described curve, then, so 
 with a recounted history. The past as a first 
 stage is but and here is a reminiscence a 
 contemporary of the present, and the future as 
 a last stage is also but a contemporary of the 
 present, while the present itself as the interme- 
 diate stage is the activity in which the relation- 
 ship of the other two is in expression. Fur- 
 thermore there is a sense, not unfamiliar to us, 
 and highly important to all who would avoid 
 any misconceptions, in which the stages of any 
 process are materially as well as formally co- 
 
RESPONSIBILITY OF SOCIETY. 129 
 
 existent. Indeed formal coexistence and formal 
 sequence alike have been impossible to us. 
 The sequent and the coexistent are one, action 
 being but the expression in sequence of the 
 persistent relations of the coexistent. Thus, 
 is the orient as indicative of a life at one with 
 itself -the first stage or was W. Both. And 
 is the reunion of Occident and orient the 
 third stage or is it to be? Both. And, 
 finally, in the relation of the sequent to the 
 coexistent we see once more the danger of too 
 arbitrarily identifying the stages of a process 
 with localities. To repeat from above what 
 was but another way of expressing the thought 
 here, peculiar environing conditions, in other 
 words, peculiar localities can not of themselves 
 be said to make peculiar societies when the 
 human nature out of which societies are built 
 is as broad and as deep as the whole to which 
 it belongs. In space and in time alike whole 
 and part, unity and difference, the undeter- 
 mined and the local or momentary can not be 
 separated. Coexistences are materially cotem- 
 porary and sequences are only the expression 
 of the organic unity of coexistences. 
 
 Is this too metaphysical or too philosophical 
 even for the philosophers themselves.? Pos- 
 
I30 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTOR V. 
 
 sibly, but I cannot doubt that such of them as 
 will think as well as read will find a truth in it. 
 The language is simple enough and it means 
 exactly what it says. Science, it seems to me, 
 after busying herself so long with stages or 
 moments or degrees, needs to be aroused to a 
 real responsibility to her own words. Stages 
 in themselves are not history any more than 
 positions are a curve or than places are a jour- 
 ney. History transcends its stages and its 
 localities by persistently contemporizing and 
 universalizing them. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE STAGES OF SOCIETY'S ACTIVITY. 
 
 7TS already given, the three stages of a society's 
 '^ activity are those of its at-one-ness with 
 self, of its alienation from self, and of its 
 restoration to self; and we found them signifi- 
 cant, not in themselves, but only in their 
 relationship or in the single activity that they 
 define. For purposes of discussion, however, 
 we have to keep them apart; and here, with 
 the philosopher's license, we may even assign 
 to each one of them its own peculiar formula; 
 to the first: what is, is, which is the formula 
 of life as naive; to the second: what is not, is, 
 the formula of life as external to itself or sub- 
 ject to the unnatural or supernatural; and 
 again to the third: what is, is, which, although 
 verbally a repetition, is here the formula, not 
 of the naive, but of the supernatural naturalized 
 or of the natural as rationally free. 
 
 But the stages of a society's activity, the 
 stages of social evolution, have something 
 besides these interesting mottoes. They have 
 
132 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 incidents or conditions. Accordingly our task 
 is now to discover exactly what the incidents 
 are in each case. Of course, the incidents as 
 they appear will illustrate the mottoes, but the 
 mottoes need the incidents to make them real. 
 So, entering upon our task, we are to ask of 
 each one of the three stages the following 
 questions: Who is the typical individual? 
 Upon what is sovereignty based? What is the 
 natural form of government? Of what charac- 
 ter is law? What is the true form of property? 
 What, of literature? And what, of religion? 
 These are searching questions, and although 
 they involve us in a discussion that may prove 
 a little tedious on account of its verbal repeti- 
 tions, or, let us say on account of the rattle of 
 its machinery, the work itself even with the 
 noise is well worth our while. 
 
 In the first stage, that of society's at-one- 
 ness with itself, the personal individual, the 
 social type, is the naive or unreflective laborer. 
 The term laborer, however, is almost too 
 specific or too technical, but sufBce it to say 
 that no distinctions of class are intended. The 
 basis of sovereignty is the social life itself; the 
 life, this is to say, rather than the will, since a 
 social will has not yet been aroused. The 
 
SOCIETY'S ACTIVITY. 133 
 
 form of government is that of a direct mon- 
 archy, which is also a direct democracy, as 
 illustrated in patriarchism, or perhaps in the 
 early Greek communities whose kings {BamXeiq) 
 were the direct agents of the people. Law is 
 personal command. Property consists in land 
 or nature in general, held in common, and in 
 the products of nature, which are exchanged 
 through barter, there being no selected medium 
 of exchange. As to literature, properly speak- 
 ing, there is none, although in ballads and 
 stories or yarns of a traditional and often 
 mythical character that pass from mouth to 
 mouth the germs of a literature are present. 
 And, lastly the religion is naturistic or for 
 this seems a better word absolutely simple, 
 being without question and without dogma. 
 God is near to man; nay. He and man are one. 
 A golden age, you say.? Yes, and significant 
 exactly as that is significant. Of it, as well as 
 of each of the two other stages, we must 
 remember that it is an extreme, a limit, and 
 so in a sense only a philosopher's fancy, and 
 even to illustrate it as a whole or in any of its 
 parts as occasionally I have tried to is to be 
 almost untrue to it, to force it perhaps a little 
 ahead of itself. But without illustration, you 
 
134 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 insist, it is empty, meaningless. So it is, until 
 we can observe it from the standpoint of 
 another stage. 
 
 In the second stage, then, the stage of the 
 alienation, the typical individual is the soldier, 
 again to use a technical term without intending 
 any distinction of class. The soldier in gen- 
 eral is he who lives beside himself, whose 
 activity is not his own, who belongs to a soci- 
 ety that is physically a mere mechanism of 
 differences established from without and spir- 
 itually the spiritual being that which is not, 
 the external a perfect community, a company 
 of individuals all alike. Living beside himself, 
 alienated from himself, he is ready at any 
 moment to die, his very alienation being a 
 sanction of any change, however violent, in 
 his life. In a society of soldiers, further, the 
 sovereignty rests on worldly might, which is 
 purely physical force, or on spiritual authority. 
 In history, when God has appointed the king, 
 might has always been a basis of right; and 
 naturally enough, because might is only exter- 
 nal authority, as it were, in the flesh. Might 
 is only the reality of the spiritual.^ But, next, 
 the government is an absolute monarchy, the 
 
 * Cf . pp. 63-64. 
 
SOCIETY'S ACTIVITY. 135 
 
 monarch a soldier himself being not a 
 worldly individual, but the universal individual, 
 and in this character even representative of his 
 subjects,* since in a society where all are spir- 
 itually equal any one when physically and 
 spiritually equipped can represent all. And 
 the law is given, traditional, statutory; not the 
 mandate of an individual, for that would make 
 it worldly and so would deny the alienation, 
 but, if I may borrow the term, scriptural, and 
 not with any mixture of equity, for that too is 
 worldly or responsible to differences. Property 
 consists in mere domain and in money as some 
 simple in the sense of directly derived or un- 
 changed product of nature, both of these being 
 abstract or universal, or suppose we say 
 appropriately enough unworldly forms of 
 property. Mere domain unimproved nature 
 and coin are property freed of all the specific 
 relations of life. Infinite possibilities of rela- 
 tion are in them, but for themselves alone they 
 are the natural possessions of the unworldly 
 individual, exacting no worldly duties, depend- 
 ing on no worldly ties, being valuable merely 
 
 *The fact, here plainly indicated, that even absolute 
 monarchy, is a form of representative government is one indi- 
 cation among many of the ways in which these stages of 
 society's growth are as contemporary as sequent, 
 
1 36 PHIL O SOPHY OF HI ST OR Y, 
 
 in possession, and being freely, that is, without 
 danger of loss or injury, inheritable. The 
 soldier, obviously, must have a freely inherit- 
 able property. Payment in anything else he 
 cannot but refuse. In history, now to give 
 the dangerous illustration, when property has 
 had the form of landed estates and coin, mere 
 possession constituting right and might being 
 the beginning and the end of possession, the 
 property-owner has worked his land and earned 
 his coin only through slaves or servants of 
 some kind, being himself a military lord, not 
 a ploughman and not even a ** gentleman- 
 farmer;" and in just this separation of master 
 and laborers, of will and activity, we can see 
 the social implications of property as here con- 
 sidered. With society alienated from itself 
 both are will and activity necessarily apart 
 and apart also are the agents and the return 
 for what they do. But, to continue, to this 
 second stage belong a given, ready-made liter- 
 ature and in the technical sense a revealed 
 religion. Language has no life of its own, but 
 it is the repository of truth as something abso- 
 lute and unchanging; and perhaps in a single 
 book or in a single man religion may have its 
 beginning and its end. Original thinking is as 
 
SOCIETY'S ACTIVITY, 137 
 
 unnatural as it is sacrilegious. Copying, en- 
 grossing, memorizing, and possibly logical 
 gymnastic and textual annotation are as far as 
 the intellectual class the priesthood can 
 ever allow itself to go, but these things it will 
 do with a faithfulness and a patience that only 
 a soldier's implicit devotion can make possible. 
 Is not language the Word, the Incarnate 
 Word.? 
 
 But, lastly, when as in the third stage society is 
 restored to itself, the typical individual is the 
 mechanic again without intending any dis- 
 tinctions of class in whom, as it were, the 
 dead soldier has his resurrection. Thus the 
 mechanic is the skilled laborer. Not only like 
 the soldier has he a place in society, but also is 
 he directly or consciously and voluntarily 
 responsible to it. He is as much a leader as 
 one led. He has identified himself with the 
 freedom of the military life to which as only a 
 mechanical part he had previously belonged. 
 The activity in which he shared slavishly is 
 become his activity. In short, he has brought 
 his other self, his unworldly self, in which he 
 had been so isolated, into the world, finding it 
 real and as spiritual as real in the life that is. 
 And with this finding on his part the society to 
 
138 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 which he belongs and the social life are no 
 longer separated, but are restored to each 
 other. The state and its members become 
 one, and in the social will, as the will of a self- 
 conscious organism, the sovereignty resides, 
 and the government takes the form of a con- 
 stitutional democracy, in which the constitution 
 is adaptive or elastic, being regarded not as 
 something to which society owes its existence, 
 but as something which owes its existence to 
 society, as something which is definitive only, 
 not creative. Law, in the special sense, is 
 also elastic, equity conspicuously absent in 
 the second stage being here the moving spirit; 
 and property is either machinery, which com- 
 prises all improved natural resources, all 
 applications of natural force, or credit, which 
 is that in which productive power or skill is 
 made the sole right to property and so also the 
 sole medium of exchange. So long as any 
 single natural product or commodity, such as 
 gold or silver or anything else, is the medium, 
 or as unimproved nature is the form of prop- 
 erty, just so long mere possession constitutes 
 the right to property and ownership is also an 
 arbitrary or military leadership of labor, the 
 will or power of action as well as its return 
 
SOCIETY'S ACTIVITY, 139 
 
 being separated from action itself; but for the 
 freed individualism, the skilled labor, of this 
 third stage, in which no man can be set beside 
 himself, or alienated from himself, the arbi- 
 trary medium, whether of the silver-heresy, or 
 the gold-dogma or the paper-lunacy, is impos- 
 sible. Credit, then, be it said again, as the 
 subjective or personal, and machinery as the 
 objective or natural form of property, credit 
 being the recognized capacity of production 
 and machinery the material means to the pro- 
 duction, are here the only possible forms of 
 property. In them capitalist and laborer 
 become one. That property, however, so 
 conditioned depends on a well-defined social 
 consciousness, on a freedom of prompt and 
 accurate information the world over, and on 
 an untrammeled movement and interaction 
 among individuals, on a freedom of safe and 
 rapid transportation to any point, is self-evi- 
 dent. In olden times all roads led to Rome, 
 and the day came when over the roads hurried, 
 not Rome's couriers and not Rome's armies, but 
 barbarians, who dealt a fatal blow to militarism; 
 and today we see how roads and wires are break- 
 ing the strength of the military industrialism 
 that our unskilled labor and our irresponsible 
 
1 40 PHIL O SOPHY OF HIS TOR Y. 
 
 capital* have helped each other to maintain so 
 long. But, finally, in the third stage literature 
 is mediative, language being no dead and for- 
 mal thing, but alive and responsive, and the 
 thought expressed in it being no abstract truth, 
 fixed and as meaningless as fixed, but a mov- 
 ing, liberating idea that is one with life itself; 
 and religion is a natural religion, in which God 
 is immanent in what his creatures do, their 
 acts having a positive share in his creation, 
 and in which the truth that faithfully and 
 responsibly defines the condition of life to 
 those that live is the only real, because the 
 only effective or answerable prayer. Worship 
 is skill in the social life, not ritual; and the 
 church is society itself, not a mass of bricks 
 and stained glass. 
 
 Utopian vision.? Yes, but also an actual 
 condition, a present already active impulse 
 as well as a future dream ; a life, in which the 
 present is now transcending its own limitations; 
 and so worthy of our attention. 
 
 And here I will repeat the illustrations, that 
 were suggested before, of the three stages of 
 society's growth: the orient, the Occident, and 
 
 * By irresponsible capital I mean capital to which posses- 
 sion is the only basis of right. 
 
SOCIETY'S ACTIVITY, 141 
 
 the now rising restoration of each to the other; 
 Greek Hfe, Roman Hfe, and the moving Chris- 
 tianity of Europe and America today; and 
 colonial America, sectional America covering 
 the period from the Revolution through to the 
 RebelHon, perhaps to the present time and 
 America as a truly organized democracy. But, 
 as has been said in so many words, such illus- 
 trations are likely to be as obscure as luminous. 
 Still we may use them if we use them cau- 
 tiously, ever remembering that the sequent and 
 the coexistent are fundamentally one. The 
 past is always present in another locality, and 
 coexistences, in spite of their local differences, 
 are materially as well as formally contempor- 
 ary. History ever transcends both its stages 
 and its localities by persistently contemporizing 
 the former and universalizing the latter. 
 
i 
 
 3 
 
 Naturistic, 
 
 simple. God 
 
 and nature 
 
 one, and very 
 
 near to man. 
 
 Supernatural, 
 
 revealed. 
 
 Manifest in a 
 
 single book or 
 
 in a single 
 
 man. 
 
 Natural, but 
 from the super- 
 natural being 
 naturalized. 
 God immanent 
 in humanity. 
 
 O 
 H 
 
 Pi 
 W 
 
 .3 
 
 Sills 
 
 <H|J|||.| 
 
 2^ Q.A '>^*: 
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 1?^ 
 
 ill M% 
 
 c-a o ao X 
 
 a. * 
 
 :lM!li 
 
 Qoo Pio," 
 
 1 till oil 
 
 j3.-t;.2 a rt *^ S 
 
 O 
 
 < 
 
 13 .G 
 
 CO <u 
 
 rt > 
 
 si-si 
 
 is 
 
 o w 
 
 
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 g o-:H "5 s-G 
 
 o.^ "':3 o -o 
 
 n> oj o a- > <u 
 
 
 <u V en C 
 
 fl.t: o o Q.iS-a M 
 
 lolls 
 
 5 OS O 
 
 H 
 
 u 
 
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 .w'o o a 
 "g a = 
 
 iS-agl 
 
 ho; So 
 
 O 
 
 < 
 
 t-4 
 
 
 Jii 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE PROCESS OF SOCIETY'S ALIENATION FROM 
 ITSELF. 
 
 NOW that we have the landmarks of a 
 society's progress so well defined, we can 
 follow the course of it in greater detail. The 
 processes of alienation and restoration that 
 make the transition from the first stage to the 
 second and from the second to the third 
 respectively are most important, and by the 
 continuity or self-consistency that will be man- 
 ifested in them, will help to make the real sig- 
 nificance of the stages themselves still more 
 definite to us.* 
 
 Of the first of these two transitional pro- 
 cesses we have already had at least a general 
 view. In a very general way we have seen 
 how social individuation involves territorial 
 and historical and industrial consciousness, 
 
 * Recall, too, from above this statement: * The peculiar 
 relation between the sequent and the coexistent that the con- 
 ditions of activity [or progress] evidently require makes con- 
 tinuity as that alone in which the two can be at one with each 
 other a necessity. Continuity is only a purely physical con- 
 ception of relationship." Pp. 29-30. 
 
144 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 conflict with self or nature, rising formalism, 
 disintegration at home, and abroad hostile 
 relations which threaten invasion if not over- 
 throw; but there are important accompani- 
 ments of these general changes which should 
 have careful consideration. 
 
 Social individuation, very much like personal 
 individuation, induces an organic localization 
 of functions. It brings a more or less definite, 
 an ever more definite division of society into 
 distinct classes, and a more or less definite, an 
 ever more definite localization of these classes 
 in the recognized territory. Of course the 
 territorial separation of a society is evidence of 
 an organically differentiating and localizing 
 process in the life of nature as the including 
 whole, and this is a fact not to be lost sight of, 
 but for the present it is to be kept in the back- 
 ground. For the present we are to narrow 
 our view to the inner change and condition of 
 an individual society. What, then, a society's 
 inner differentiation at once political and 
 geographical is and why it is are the prob- 
 lems confronting us. 
 
 But these problems are easily solved, for 
 social individuation, like personal individua- 
 tion, involves an intensification of conscious- 
 
SOCIETY'S ALIENATION FROM ITSELF. 145 
 
 ness, a growing tension in the expression of 
 the organic Hfe; and with this a society begins 
 to divide the labor of its activity and particu- 
 larly to develop within itself certain special 
 organs or classes, whose office it is to define 
 the consciousness, and certain other special 
 organs or classes, whose office it is to supply 
 the more material needs of the social life. In 
 other words, thinkers arise, who separate 
 themselves from direct contact with life and 
 nature, and servants or in the narrower sense 
 laborers, who retain a relation to life and 
 nature, but in such a lifeless or mechanical or 
 left-handed way as to make them materially 
 as well as formally the contemporaries of their 
 leisured ** superiors." And with this separa- 
 tion of classes there comes also the develop- 
 ment of towns and cities and of a single 
 metropolis or intellectual and political centre. 
 In the metropolis the social life grows intense, 
 keenly self-conscious, dramatic, more brilliant 
 than genuine, while beyond the city gates, in 
 what comes to be called almost reproachfully 
 the "country," the life seems even to be losing 
 the consciousness that it had, becoming dull, 
 monotonous and quite as unreal as the glare 
 of the distant city. A poet might exclaim of 
 
146 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY, 
 
 the two: Is not one the dull east, the other 
 the glowing west of a closing day! 
 
 But a keener consciousness in an individual 
 society, as in an individual person, signifies 
 control or to use a word familiar to the psy- 
 chologists if to no one else inhibition; and 
 control or inhibition does not mean cessation 
 of activity, but activity for its own sake instead 
 of for any clearly recognized motive or relation 
 beyond itself. Some time ago we found activity 
 for activity's sake, the turning of life into a 
 cult, a natural accompaniment of a society's 
 conflict with itself, but now we are to connect 
 it with the differentiation of society into classes 
 both locally and functionally distinct. In 
 order to act effectively against the strengthen- 
 ing opposition without a society must get itself 
 together, whatever the cost; and, as we know, 
 the cost is a growing self-consciousness with 
 all its incidents. The cost is a consciousness 
 that is as dramatic or abstract as it is local 
 and an overt activity, a conduct of life, a labor, 
 that is as mechanical as it is local. Only with 
 this cost can the control, necessary to greater 
 effectiveness, be secured. But why call it 
 cost.-* Because it shows society living its own 
 death, becoming alienated from itself. 
 
SOCIETY'S ALIENATION FROM ITSELF. 147 
 
 Consciousness, then, signifies control; it 
 signifies a control which on one side, that of 
 the self-conscious, dramatic reproduction of 
 life, is to be seen geographically in the city 
 and politically in the leisured class, and on the 
 other side, that of the mechanical conduct of 
 life, geographically in the country and politi- 
 cally in the serving or laboring class.* 
 
 In a city, as it grows, we see a people com- 
 ing to live its life as if to itself. The city, so 
 wonderfully mobile, shows us miles of farm- 
 land and years of experience focussed in a 
 single square. It is the very much contracted 
 life, and its institutions are the very much con- 
 tracted symbol of the country. The old rela- 
 tions of course persist, the old interests and 
 the old needs, but wonderfully intensified. 
 
 * Of much that has been said and is yet to be said in this 
 chapter, I have already given a rough outline {^Dynamic Ideal- 
 ism^ pp. 190 sq.), and except for occasional verbal changes I 
 may at times even quote myself literally here without the 
 encumbrance of quotation marks. At the time of the earlier 
 statement I was chiefly interested in using the process of 
 social change as an illustration of the general process of 
 thought. The process of thought manifests a similar func- 
 tional and spatial differentiation. In company with the defini- 
 tion of consciousness, thought-organs are developed that are 
 distinct from the organs of conduct, and also in company with 
 the developed expression of thought in language there appears 
 the distinction between right-handedness or conscious activ- 
 ity and lef t-handedness or mechanical activity. The visible 
 institutions of a society are the language in which its thought 
 is expressed. 
 
148 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 The great department store, for example, is 
 the country store over again, but on a much 
 grander scale; and the streets have the same 
 functions as the country roads, but driver and 
 wayfarer cannot be too alert. Yes, the city 
 repeats or dramatically rehearses the country 
 life, and intensifies it, turning simplicity into 
 complexity, naivete into self-consciousness and 
 sophistication. But, more than this, the rise 
 of the city, with its congested population and 
 all, shows the country life suffering decHne, for 
 the people as a whole are living to themselves, 
 as if the activity were for its own sake, not to 
 nature. Consider how the rural civilization 
 decays. The country folk lose their culture 
 and change to mere drudges, little better than 
 day-laborers, living with nature perhaps, but 
 not to her; living as said before only left- 
 handedly. Inactivity sets in among them. 
 Their agriculture passes into the hands of large 
 owners and becomes so far as they are con- 
 cerned a purely mechanical process. Possibly 
 it is taken from them altogether by being 
 transferred to unsettled territory, or by being 
 assumed by the cheaper labor of invaders. 
 And the city's great department store not only 
 reproduces the country store, but also takes 
 
SOCIETY'S ALIENATION FROM ITSELF. 149 
 
 away its business by conducting an ever- 
 increasing out-of-town trade. The city, too, 
 goes to the theatre and the ball, while the 
 deserted folk on the neglected farms pine for 
 the days when life was so much more worth 
 while, even resenting the means of communi- 
 cation and transportation that have made the 
 changes possible. In short, then, the country 
 dies as the city lives; and it dies, just because 
 ^ as was said in the city a people is living its 
 old Hfe to itself, the more positive expression 
 of it having been put in abeyance. Or, again, 
 with its absorbing interest in control, in dis- 
 tribution and communication and manufacture, 
 rather than in direct production, the city mani- 
 fests just such a withdrawal from nature 
 from the sphere of original expression as is 
 implied always in the rise of self-consciousness; 
 and the country that is perhaps more beauti- 
 ful or more picturesque by reason of the decay 
 in its dull existence shows the contemporary 
 effect on the conduct of life. 
 
 But somebody is impatient to accuse me of 
 forgetting myself. In what purports to be an 
 account of a much earlier time in the life of 
 human society I am allowing myself the most 
 modern terms, terms that are so modern as 
 
150 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 possibly to seem even vulgarly offensive to 
 those who have any proper historical sense. I 
 am like the great preacher who thrilled his 
 audience with the roar of cannon and the glit- 
 ter of bayonets in one of the long-ago battles 
 between Romans and Parthians. Well, I con- 
 fess my forgetfulness; but what historian, who 
 ever gets free from mere antiquarism, can help 
 forgetting? A modern realism surely does no 
 greater violence to history than antiquarism. 
 Terms indeed may change in the course of 
 time, but the relations of life do not change. 
 Besides, have we not found that the contem- 
 porary past was the only past that we could 
 recognize.-* Whatever we may call them, the 
 things that are were and the things that were 
 are. A physical scientist sees the same law, 
 the same force, in both the explosion of gun- 
 powder and the blows and movements of bat- 
 tle-axes and javelins, and an economist the 
 same social life in both the marts of ancient 
 cities and the great department stores of today. 
 So my forgetting is also remembering. 
 
 And, turning now to the political in distinc- 
 tion from the geograpical differentiation of an 
 individual or self-conscious society, we shall 
 get still more history of the sort that finds the 
 
SOCIETY'S ALIENATION FROM ITSELF. 151 
 
 past also present. Thus, the control or inhibi- 
 tion that the consciousness brings shows itself 
 also in the so-called supremacy of the leisured 
 class. The thinkers rule; the laborers obey. 
 There is, too, a third class, as if to mediate 
 between these two extremes, that is in general 
 the official class. The thinkers define in the 
 social consciousness the law of the social life; 
 the workers preserve the life itself while the 
 definition is in process; the officials execute 
 the law as it is promulgated; and all three are 
 at once functionally distinguishable but mate- 
 rially contemporary. Simply a society become 
 self-conscious and awakened to the pressing 
 need of control can do without no one of 
 them. 
 
 It is often said that a thinking or intellectual 
 class arises in society whenever prosperity has 
 brought leisure, and this statement is true 
 enough when it is properly understood. One 
 needs first to recognize that leisure in one 
 direction always brings severe responsibility in 
 another, that there may be, nay must be as 
 much leisure in labor as in thought, and sec- 
 ondly to comprehend fully what the dependence 
 of a leisured thinking class on a serving labor- 
 ing class really is. The thought-life, however 
 
152 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 abstract its thinking may become, is based 
 psychologically as well as sociologically on 
 what in general we are calling labor. Is it 
 not an incident of control? And is control less 
 easy than expression? Thinker and laborer 
 are born of the same social life, and what the 
 former controls in spite of the tendency of his 
 nature the latter expresses without the need of 
 thought. Which, then, has the most leisure, 
 the inactive thinker or the unthinking laborer, 
 it would indeed be hard to say. But, further- 
 more, in regard to the relation of the two, the 
 relegation of the labor of a society to slaves or 
 servants or to men of material affairs generally, 
 which is so necessary to the rise of an intellec- 
 tual class, never takes place and never can 
 take place unless all have the acquired power 
 to do what is relegated to the few. Are not 
 all, as was said, sprung from the same life? 
 Thinkers and laborers alike must have a devel- 
 oped capacity, a freedom, which in terms of 
 powers and impulses is the same, even if it 
 come to overt expression only among the lat- 
 ter; and in this freedom, in this acquired 
 capacity, although inert or only potential in 
 the life of those that think, lies the real basis 
 of the intellectual life. Thus, to repeat sum- 
 
SOCIETY'S ALIENATION FROM ITSELF. 153 
 
 marily, the subjective capacity to do the work 
 of society and the relegation of the work itself 
 to a special class are equally necessary to the 
 rise of thinkers, the former being a psychologi- 
 cal and the latter a sociological condition. 
 There were no thought, no science, possible in 
 a social life without labor, and the thinker as 
 well as the laborer must have the power, the 
 adapted structure that the labor requires. 
 How else could thought define to society the 
 law of its activity? Why, even the circus- 
 performer, what with his great skill in express- 
 ing the relations of space, is one of a whole 
 army of servants of the abstract sciences of 
 space and motion; but no man on earth could 
 be an abstract mathematician who was not 
 structurally adapted to move in space as freely 
 as the most agile gymnast. This is a fanciful, 
 if not an absurd illustration; but I think it 
 embodies a principle. In the gymnast, as in 
 all cases of service, we see a certain activity 
 taken out of real life and made a cult, and this 
 abstraction is only as it were the open practice 
 of that which an abstract science defines. 
 Moreover, the science and the practice, which 
 are equally abstract, must be remembered as 
 the two intimately related incidents of the 
 
154 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 control that a self-conscious society finds 
 necessary; and while they are both of them 
 signs that society is being alienated from itself, 
 they are signs also, because of their intimate 
 relation, that alienation is not all that is going 
 on. Psychologically or sociologically, the time 
 can not but come when labor and thought will 
 return to each other. Thus, whenever science 
 is afield, it is well to look for a revolution. 
 But this is anticipating, 
 
 A society's thought is long in developing and 
 we need to follow the process of the develop- 
 ment in its several moments before we can 
 adequately comprehend how it must culminate 
 in a revolution. That alienation is a forerun- 
 ner of revolution is quite evident, but the 
 successive details of the process are important, 
 although their differences may prove to be only 
 in degree. Accordingly, with reference par- 
 ticularly to the three social classes, already 
 named, the thinkers, the officials, and the 
 laborers, I have found it convenient to recog- 
 nize five moments in the alienating process, 
 these moments, namely: (i) the moment of 
 consciously asserted patriotism; (2) the mo- 
 ment of aesthethic self-appreciation; (3) the 
 moment of the cosmopolitan spirit; (4) the 
 
SOCIETY'S ALIENATION FROM ITSELF. 155 
 
 moment of assumed and cultivated naturalism, 
 and (5) the moment of spiritual surrender and 
 resignation. Thus, here they are in a table, 
 with the contemporary class changes: 
 
 FIVE MOMENTS IN A SOCIETY'S ALIENATION FROM ITSELF. 
 
 Sg 
 
 
 
 
 Historical 
 
 
 Thinkers. 
 
 Officials. 
 
 Laborers. 
 
 Illustra- 
 
 
 
 
 
 tion. 
 
 OS 
 
 
 
 
 
 I 
 
 Law-makers. 
 
 Public guar- 
 dians or pat- 
 riots. 
 
 Slaves. 
 
 Greece before 
 Pericles' time, 
 
 2 
 
 Artists. 
 
 Conscious and 
 critical citi- 
 zens. 
 
 Paid servants. 
 
 The age of 
 Pericles. 
 
 3 
 
 Scientists. 
 
 Politicians. 
 
 Artisans. 
 
 The period 
 just before 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Socrates. 
 
 4 
 
 Philosophers. 
 
 Fatalists or 
 
 Revolution- 
 
 The Socratic 
 
 
 
 time-servers. 
 
 ists. 
 
 Period. 
 
 5 
 
 Religious lead- 
 
 Followers or 
 
 Hirelings. 
 
 Greece a Chris 
 
 
 er or mon- 
 
 disciples. 
 
 
 tian-Roman 
 
 
 arch. 
 
 
 
 province. 
 
 A mere glance at this table shows a progres- 
 sive increase in the degree of the alienation of 
 the society as a whole from itself, from its 
 institutions and traditions, or otherwise put 
 a progressive increase in the degree of the 
 independence or individual freedom of the 
 members of society. The very slaves are lib- 
 erated, but only as their superiors, the thinkers 
 and the officials, lose their own loyalty to the 
 existing order of things. In the fourth column 
 of the table I have introduced a set of illustra- 
 tions from the past which are somewhat dan- 
 
156 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 gerous, but if used cautiously may be helpful. 
 Also it is to be recognized that the names 
 selected for the different classes in the different 
 moments had to be selected somewhat arbi- 
 trarily. Naming the moments of a continuous 
 process is exactly like naming the indistin- 
 guishable parts of the spectrum. The unity 
 of the table, however, will help to interpret 
 the parts of it. But let us follow the different 
 moments in detail. 
 
 In general thought controls activity in order 
 to unify or organize it, and in society's unifica- 
 tion or organization of its life the first thinkers 
 to arise are naturally law-makers, because law 
 is a means to the mere control rather than to 
 the positive interpretation of what is doing. 
 Mere control, through legal * ' thou shalts ' ' and 
 * * thou shalt nots, " is an antecedent condition 
 of interpretation, or rather of clearer interpre- 
 tation, since the control itself, when possible, 
 is evidence of a more or less indefinite sense of 
 what the interpretation is going to be. In 
 individual experience, when conflict and need 
 of adjustment come, we at first treat ourselves 
 legally do we not.-* issuing commands to 
 ourselves to do or not to do this or that which 
 in themselves are not interpretations of what 
 
SOCIETY'S ALIENATION FROM ITSELF. 157 
 
 we are doing but both imply interpretation 
 and lead to more definite interpretation of 
 what our life is and so of what ought to be its 
 expression. Law-makers, then, being the 
 first thinkers, slaves as those who in their 
 obedience are as unreasoning as the law that 
 controls them are the first laborers, and pubHc 
 guardians or patriots, by whom the law is con- 
 fused with the state or who are almost blind 
 in their loyalty to the law as well as in their 
 treatment of the slaves, are the first officials. 
 And after law, art. Both law and art are 
 material or sensuous in their terms and in their 
 standpoint, but law interprets and controls the 
 impulses of life only implicitly, or say nega- 
 tively or indirectly, while art interprets and 
 controls them directly and positively. Art 
 does not say : * Thou shalt ' ' and ' Thou shalt 
 not," but simply reveals unity or harmony in 
 the sphere of the expression of the different 
 acts to which man is impelled, and this unity 
 or harmony exercises control. The control, 
 however, is no longer arbitrary or irrational, 
 being as much a matter of motive as of com- 
 mand, of will as of compulsion, and as if in 
 recognition of this change, the laborers in 
 society become paid servants, servants who 
 
158 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 have a conscious and voluntary share in the 
 unity of the social life, and the officials become 
 conscious citizens in the sense of observers and 
 critics of what is doing rather than mere 
 unreasoning champions of it. Every part of 
 society has to share in the change; else the 
 artist's consciousness v^ould be in the air and 
 he would have no public. 
 
 That art is more alienating, or more liber- 
 ating, than law hardly needs to be said. Art 
 transfers the control of life from the human to 
 the natural and so subordinates human law to 
 natural law, or as the same thing finds a 
 principle of control in human experience as 
 such. Human experience includes nature as 
 well as man, and when treated as the source 
 of that which controls man it tends to free him 
 from the visible traditions and institutions of 
 the society in which he has been living. 
 
 The rise of art in Greece illustrates this, and 
 the rise of art at the close of the * * dark ages ' 
 accompanied as it was by the doctrine of 
 justification by faith, that is only an appeal to 
 human experience also illustrates it; but here 
 we shall speak only of the first. In Greek art, 
 which came as a sort of celebration of Greek 
 patriotism and achievement, we see a national 
 
SOCIETY'S ALIENATION FROM ITSELF. 159 
 
 life, its religion, its politics, and its morals, 
 put upon the stage or in general held up for 
 rational observation and for criticism, since 
 observation involves criticism, 
 
 * * In the art and literature of Greece, " if I 
 may quote myself,"^ * ' it is wrong to see a people 
 only paying tribute to its past. Art always 
 defines the past, and definition of the past sets 
 
 the future free In Greek art 
 
 . '. . there was more than a golden age, 
 there was the closing in of a people's conflict. 
 The expression of experience in works of art 
 did for a time make the pulse beat faster with 
 pleasure and sense of worth and power; but in 
 the end the effect of putting the time-honored 
 ways and long-cherished ideals and noble deeds 
 
 and heroes upon the stage was 
 
 to show where the battle was yet to be fought, 
 in that it heralded an age of rationalism as 
 successor to morality and piety and patriotism. 
 Staging life, however reverently at first, had to 
 lead in time to moral laxity, impiety, corrup- 
 tion in political life, and general social disin- 
 tegration. It robbed life of all that had given 
 it worth and coherence and power to satisfy 
 the moral and religious nature; it made the 
 
 * Citizenship and Salvation, pp. 14-15. 
 
l6o PHIL O SO PHY OF HIS TOR Y. 
 
 traditional meaning of life external; it turned 
 life into a form or convention instead of a con- 
 tent with any substantial spiritual worth; into 
 
 a something merely to be used 
 
 rather than what it had been an inner 
 strength and support. In the Greek plays 
 [and they show the tendency in all art] natural 
 law . . . came to succeed the gods [and 
 also men] in the control of human life." 
 
 In short art alienates. In it, from the 
 standpoint of the life out of which it springs, 
 there is a motive to treachery. The control 
 that it induces is lawlessness also, but only 
 because natural law must always transgress the 
 laws of men. 
 
 But after art, science. Science is art at its 
 limit, very much as art might be styled legis- 
 lation at its limit. Science sees only the 
 natural, forgetting the human in so far as this 
 is anything distinct; and, as a consequence, 
 art's sensuously expressed ideal becomes only 
 an idea or a natural mechanical law, the unity 
 or harmony of art having become freed from 
 any sensuous relation to restrained impulses or 
 stimulating objects. The symbol of a scien- 
 tific idea is a mere symbol, valueless in itself, 
 being as indifferent to the purely iensuous 
 
SOCIETY'S ALIENATION FROM ITSELF. i6i 
 
 consciousness as the external nature whose law 
 it symbolizes; and the idea itself is an abstract 
 idea, a concept. The difference in general 
 between art and science is that between a real 
 or living metaphor and a dead metaphor. 
 Thus, science succeeds art in the life of a peo- 
 ple so soon as the environment, which com- 
 prises the numerous institutions and customs 
 of the social life, is turned to a dead metaphor, 
 the life itself becoming formal or conventional. 
 Indeed it might be said in recognition of the 
 process by which metaphors die that famili- 
 arity breeds the contempt which science always 
 has for art. And so, contemporary with scien- 
 tists, as the representatives of the other social 
 classes, are politicians, for whom the social 
 life is a carefully, a mechanically measured 
 opportunity instead of a devotion, cosmopoli- 
 tanism having succeeded patriotism and 
 aesthetic satisfaction, and artisans, who also 
 serve a trade instead of a master. Perhaps 
 cosmopolitanism it will be remembered that 
 we characterized this third moment as that of 
 the cosmopolitan spirit is not the right word 
 for this place, but it can err only in being per- 
 haps a shade too explicit or too advanced, for 
 in the naturally laissez-faire attitude of science 
 
l62 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 and the disloyal selfishness of the politician 
 and the dependence of the artisan on his tools, 
 on his application of nature's resources, the 
 spirit of cosmopolitanism is certainly more 
 than merely imphcit. 
 
 Succeeding the scientist is the philosopher; 
 and with the philosopher come the time-server 
 or fatalist and the revolutionist. These terms 
 have been perhaps the hardest of all to select, 
 but each one of them is intended to indicate 
 the final assertion of independence of tradi- 
 tions, institutions, and long-cherished ideals. 
 Science, although not materially loyal to the 
 existing order, is still formally so, and the pol- 
 itician and artisan are naturally conservative 
 in the same way, but the philosopher and his 
 contemporaries lose even the form of loyalty 
 to what is. The fatalist does but execute the 
 law that the philosopher makes and the revo- 
 lutionist, as enemy abroad or traitor at home, 
 does but obediently practice it. In them all 
 the society to which they belong has brought 
 itself to the level of the life without. Through 
 conquest, perhaps as with the imperialist 
 Alexander the Great or finally through sub- 
 mission as when Greece became a Roman 
 
SOCIETY'S ALIENATION FROM ITSELF. 163 
 
 province the leveling, which is identical with 
 alienation, fulfills itself. 
 
 And conquest or submission, or let us say 
 imperialism, in which conquest and submission 
 are identical, changes philosophy into religion, 
 thought into faith, the naive individual that had 
 been, at the beginning, into the soldier as the 
 typical character of the second stage of a soci- 
 ety's activity. But why } 
 
 Just because the alienation is so complete. 
 The philosopher's thinking ceases to be his 
 thinking, or any body's thinking, almost as 
 soon as it has found expression. The philoso- 
 pher's thought is nature's thought ; his reason 
 is a world-reason. For him, even while he 
 speaks, nature ceases to be even formally ex- 
 ternal to man, becoming all-inclusive, all-ab- 
 sorbing. To him man and nature, the subjective 
 and the objective, the inner and the outer, the 
 life at home and the life abroad, neighbor and 
 foreigner are one. Through him the spirit of 
 the age, both as a thought and as a life, is set 
 free, or rather through him thought and life are 
 made one. But the unity of thought and life, 
 upon which the freedom of the Spirit of the 
 Age really depends, is religion; it is religion in 
 the sense that identifies faith and works. 
 
l64 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY, 
 
 Science, we saw, was art at its limit, and in 
 like manner philosophy is science at its limit. 
 As was said, even the only formal separation 
 of subject and object, upon which science de- 
 pends, disappears in the thinking of philosophy, 
 so that and this involves the truth of all lim- 
 its, does it not? philosophy, although the limit 
 of science, is itself not scientific. The limit 
 outgrows its antecedents. And with the out- 
 growth expression of the thought of a society is 
 no longer even in lifeless institutions, in envi- 
 ronment as a dead metaphor, in abstract formu- 
 lae, but is embodied in the life of a man who 
 is the incarnation of the thought that had begun 
 in society so long ago and that is at last set free 
 and who comes to a people which is still blinded 
 by its own dead traditions as the messenger of 
 another world, although he is but the revealed 
 motive of their own history. So, again, phi- 
 losophy is a forerunner of religion; a forerunner 
 of the return of complexity into simplicity, of 
 the return of man to nature, of the fall of cities 
 and the death of abstract thinkers. Is not 
 philosophy agnosticism or skepticism, and being 
 this can its conclusion be anything but faith 
 and simplicity t When man is at one with 
 nature must not the word become incarnate } 
 
SOCIETY'S ALIENATION FROM ITSELF. 165 
 
 But what have conquest and submission to 
 do with all this? What has imperialism, in 
 which conquest and submission were but just 
 now said to be identical, to do with all this? 
 Why, the motive to conquest shows the life 
 without conquering the inner, does it not? It 
 shows the beginning of a surrender of an iso- 
 lated individuality. Alexander, already men- 
 tioned in illustration, did indeed carry Greek 
 civilization to the barbarians, but not less did 
 he alienate the Greeks from themselves and 
 prepare the downfall of their civilization, of 
 their art and science and religion. After Alex- 
 ander the Greek became a barbarian, or Greek 
 and barbarian, as if man and nature became 
 one in imperial Rome. And the power of 
 Rome had it a worldly or a spiritual sanction? 
 It had both in one. The monarch was also 
 the God, the Incarnate Spirit of another world, 
 and his subjects, at once soldiers and disciples. 
 So, then, is the alienation of a society from 
 itself fulfilled in imperialism, the establishing 
 principle of which, I should say, is this, that 
 belief in another world as supernatural, by 
 being a corrective of a people's isolation or 
 partiality, is liberation of the natural in this. 
 
l66 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 Certainly the physical, the natural, is never so 
 supreme as when the supernatural is recognized. 
 
 Here, however, we are in danger of encroach- 
 ing upon the concerns of the next chapter, 
 while there still remains something to be said 
 upon what is at present before us. The pro- 
 cess that we have been examining, in which a 
 society is seen to become alienated from itself, 
 was said at the very beginning of our examina- 
 tion to be a measure of defence. To meet a 
 recognized danger from without society devel- 
 ops thinkers and founds cities, thereby focusing 
 and intensifying its own individuality. But is 
 this sort of defence effective? Historically, yes. 
 It made Thermopylae and Marathon, Salamis 
 and Plataea, possible; and it finally brought 
 the Greek face to face with himself. We need, 
 in a word, to remember that the defence, al- 
 though at first sight of civilized man against 
 barbarian, was and always is in reality of 
 human nature against man or even of nature 
 in general against herself and that the final 
 victory comes only when a people can say with 
 Socrates, who saw so deeply into the truth of 
 alienation; '' To die is gain. ' ' 
 
 And, finally, in the succession of social classes 
 we must not for a moment imagine that the old 
 
SOCIETY'S ALIENATION FROM ITSELF. 167 
 
 classes disappear as the new arise, although in 
 a qualified sense it is true that they do. The 
 old thinkers, for example, always persist, but 
 in subjection to the new. When art has suc- 
 ceeded law, law itself appeals from the human 
 to the natural, losing its purely mandatory 
 character, and when science has succeeded art, 
 art becomes formal and mechanical, and phi- 
 losophy turns mystical with the advent of 
 religion, and corresponding changes occur in 
 the relations of the classes contemporary with 
 the thinkers. Cities, moreover, in their devel- 
 opment so intimately related to the changes in 
 the social classes, really include the country. 
 Has not somebody compared a city with a 
 great octopus? But here a reminiscence or 
 two: History ever transcends both its stages 
 and its localities by persistently contemporizing 
 the former and universalizing the latter; and: 
 Progress is the contemporizing law of the past, 
 whether as thought or as environment, becom- 
 ing the motive, which is only the contempor- 
 ized future, of the all-inclusive present. 
 
CHAPTER XL 
 
 THE PROCESS OF SOCIETY'S RESTORATION TO 
 ITSELF. 
 
 WHAT is noty is, was the highly technical 
 formula that we ventured to give for the 
 second stage of a society's progress and it was 
 the formula of the very imperialism or super- 
 naturalism or absolutism into which we have 
 just seen a society to pass upon the completion 
 of its alienation from itself. The belief, how- 
 ever, in another world, in a supernatural world, 
 appeared as a corrective of partiality of life in 
 the world that is, for it only liberates a freer, a 
 more general and more fundamental expression 
 of the natural. So, at the very moment of 
 complete alienation restoration is assured. 
 Liberation of the natural can not but restore 
 an alienated society to itself. 
 
 But let us look even once more to the state 
 in which a society finds itself at the moment 
 of its extreme alienation. Here it is, although 
 somewhat differently put. The end of life is 
 wholly lapart from the means. In terms of 
 
SOCIETY'S RESTORATION TO ITSELF. 169 
 
 popular usage, the means is physical, the end 
 spiritual. Living creatures being responsible 
 to the other world instead of to this and so being 
 the mere medium of a physical process, are 
 become the tools or in their social unity the 
 tool of whoever among them has gained the 
 greatest physical power. They are the means 
 or the source of the power, but their spiritual 
 abstraction, implying as it does a perfect phys- 
 ical or mechanical differentiation among them, 
 sanctions an individual leadership. The leader 
 as spiritually the universal individual is but the 
 visible representative of all, and as physically 
 the leader only takes his peculiar place in the 
 differentiated mechanical whole. Society, in 
 short, is an army that has life in the other 
 world, not indeed for its motive, since then its 
 individual members would be suicides instead 
 of soldiers^ but for its fearlessly recognized 
 goal. The army, however, is not an army until 
 it actually moves, motion very plainly being 
 necessary to complete alienation, but also and 
 here we are to see how unreal the second stage, 
 the stage of absolute alienation, is motion, 
 which is identical with what was above referred 
 to as liberation of the natural, not brings but 
 is the restoration of society to itself. 
 
1 70 PHILOSOPHY OF HIS TOR V. 
 
 The implications, then, of the motion or 
 activity of an army or social mechanism, of 
 society, as it were, in another world and so 
 under a monarchical military despotism, say 
 for example of imperial Rome, are the spe- 
 cial objects of our present interest. What is 
 the effect of the activity upon itself? Upon 
 the leader and the subjects? Upon the social 
 life and all its manifold relations? What 
 exactly is the nature of the restoration which 
 the activity tsf 
 
 Briefly, summarily, the effect upon itself of 
 the activity or movement of a social mech- 
 anism is not only to reveal to consciousness 
 but also to idealize or glorify its conditions. It 
 is a very general truth is it not.? that activity 
 always glorifies whatever has made it possible. 
 Nothing can be so real as to be liberative 
 without also being ideal. But just what are 
 the liberative conditions of a social mechan- 
 ism? Of course they are without number, but 
 all of them are reducible at least to two, 
 namely, to differentiation of all the parts as 
 the first and to a unifying relationship as the 
 second; and in the motion which they condi- 
 tion or make possible even these two are, so to 
 speak, brought into each other or fulfilled in 
 
SOCIETY'S RESTORATION TO ITSELF, 171 
 
 each other. The differentiation proves to be 
 identical with organization; the unity and the 
 differences are intrinsic to each other. This, 
 however, signifies that the spiritual as the one 
 or the universal and the physical as the many, 
 the different or the particular, are brought 
 together, that the supernatural is brought 
 down to the natural or the natural raised to 
 the supernatural. In a word, politically as 
 well as psychologically the free movement of a 
 mechanism is ipso facto realization of an 
 organism, since the organic is just that in 
 which unity and difference are at once identi- 
 fied and idealized, or in which the otherness of 
 the supernatural is naturalized, and this in 
 turn is only to say abstractly what in the con- 
 crete we know as the natural evolution of 
 imperialism into internationalism, of monarchy 
 into democracy, or of militarism into indus- 
 trialism. Only let an army begin to move 
 and each dying part, through its share in the 
 movement of the whole, discovers in its own 
 peculiar individuality a worth that is commen- 
 surate with that of the whole; and such a 
 discovery means, as said, internationalism and 
 democracy and industrialism. 
 
 Hence, in history, the very moment of 
 
172 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 Rome's imperial supremacy was the birth of 
 modern Christendom. Rome's freedom brought 
 her fall; not, however, in the sense of decom- 
 position or disintegration, which is all that 
 some historians have been able to see, but in 
 the sense of organic differentiation. Rome's 
 fall, in other words, was also her fulfilment. 
 Her unity persists today, but transformed, 
 because as has been asserted in effect the 
 conditions of its realization became ideal at the 
 very moment of its expression. Christendom 
 has now and always has had for its rock, for its 
 foundation, the principle that the other world, 
 instead of being something wholly apart from 
 this, is only a truth or a reality which under- 
 lies man's relation to the world that is. The 
 other world, as has been said more than once, 
 just by reason of its otherness corrects isola- 
 tion or partiality; it effects or inculcates a 
 responsibility to the whole; and responsibility 
 to the whole, implying as it does that the 
 whole is organically one, is and has been both 
 the teaching and the practice of Christendom. 
 So the birth of the organic in the mechani- 
 cal is our general account of the transition 
 from the second stage to the third or from 
 imperial Rome to our own time and with this 
 
SOCIETY'S RESTORATION TO ITSELF. 173 
 
 general view before us we can pass to a more 
 detailed examination of the process. 
 
 Thus, by no means the least important thing 
 that we see is the rise of a distinction between 
 the national or individualistic and the impe- 
 pial or universalistic institutions in the life 
 of society. Thus, state and church are differ- 
 entiated; and king and pope, language and 
 Latin, laborer and soldier, production and 
 exchange, commodity and medium or standard 
 of value, machinery and nature as mere 
 domain, jus civile and jus gentium^ science 
 and religion; and so on indefinitely. This 
 differentiation, moreover, has both a geograph- 
 ical .and a political* expression, but instead of 
 looking directly at these aspects of it we shall 
 here take a more general view. First, how- 
 ever, a caution is necessary. In each of the 
 pairs of terms enumerated some one may see 
 only a distinction without a difference and turn 
 upon me with the very pertinent question: 
 Which is national and which imperial? In 
 each case I meant to put the national first, but 
 I am not absolutely sure that I have kept the 
 same standpoint throughout the enumeration, 
 
 *In the narrower sense of "political" as referring to 
 difierentiation of social classes. 
 
174 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 and change of standpoint would indeed change 
 the order, since absolutely each term in any 
 pair is all that the other is. How could any- 
 thing else be true, when the differentiation is 
 necessarily an organic one? But just what I 
 mean here, if it is not evident already, will 
 appear as we proceed. 
 
 The differentiation of state and church is 
 one of the most familiar incidents of the fall of 
 Rome, and from the standpoint of the church 
 it meant two things, the loss of the temporal 
 power and the rise of a spiritual as well as of 
 a temporal apostasy. Society became ever 
 more and more independent of the church as 
 an institution, justification by faith supplanting 
 justification by ecclesiastical mediation; and, 
 although the Roman Church remained intact it 
 lost its hold upon all in society except in general 
 the ignorant and unskilled and indeed retained 
 its authority over these only by adapting itself 
 to the new conditions. The history of confes- 
 sion and indulgences is a startling record of 
 preservation through adaptation. But in spite 
 of losses and changes through Protestantism 
 the Roman Church has been and still is the 
 visible representative of an imperial or inter- 
 national religion. There may be the motive to 
 
SOCIETY'S RESTORATION TO ITSELF. 175 
 
 unity among all peoples in the churches and 
 sects of Protestantism, for they too are sepa- 
 rated from the State, being concerned not with 
 the political but with the human, but whatever 
 their inner spirit they are still rather na- 
 tional than imperial, while Romanism stands 
 out as the manifest symbol of the imperialism 
 of Christianity. 
 
 The differentiation of king and pope, of 
 course involved in that of state and church, is 
 or was plainly in the interest of nationalism, 
 or rather, as indicative of both the differentia- 
 tion and organization, of internationalism, the 
 king representing the individual part and the 
 pope the whole. But the king is never the 
 arbitrary ruler that the Pope or Emperor 
 had been. From the beginning he is responsi- 
 ble on the one hand to the Pope as the head of 
 the original whole, and on the other hand to 
 the life of his people as that upon which the 
 individuality, that is due to the differentiation, 
 depends. Moreover these two sources of the 
 responsibility are in reality not two but one, 
 for as the latter materializes the other turns 
 merely spiritual or formal. Witness the trans- 
 lation of the Pope from emperor to political 
 figure-head, from worldly to unworldly sover- 
 
176 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 eignty, from imperial domain to virtual impris- 
 onment. But, to return, the monarch over the 
 separated part of an original empire is neces- 
 sarily a limited or responsible monarch, and 
 very early in the development of the European 
 nations the kings or monarchs v^ere looked upon 
 as bound by lav^s of nature or principles of hu- 
 manity, the Pope being for a time the adminis- 
 trator or executor of these lav^s or principles 
 or being let us say v^ith the same meaning 
 the source of International Law. International 
 Lavv^ is in itself an appeal to the human or the 
 natural, as Hugo de Groot realized at the be- 
 ginning of the seventeenth century. And v^^hich 
 of the two. Pope or King, is national } Which 
 imperial ? Well, in answer I should say, what 
 was implied of church and state, that each is 
 invisibly what the other is visibly. They are 
 both related, mutually determining incidents of 
 an international life. 
 
 Of the rise of national languages and the 
 accompanying decline of the imperial Latin it 
 is not necessary to speak at length. Of course 
 Latin still has a place, but only as a part of the 
 ritual in the Roman church or as an educational 
 discipline throughout Christendom ; and in either 
 of these functions it shows the imperial turned 
 
SOCIETY'S RESTORATION TO ITSELF. 177 
 
 formal in the interest of the national or indi- 
 vidual. And as for the national languages it is 
 sufficient to remember that they are organically 
 one language, only reflecting in their relations 
 and interactions the life of the nations to which 
 they belong. They have never been dead to 
 each other. 
 
 But the differentiation of laborer and soldier 
 is an incident in the process of restoration that 
 is of special importance to us and it calls there- 
 fore for a most careful treatment. The limita- 
 tion of monarchy that rises with the organic 
 division of the imperial whole is naturally ac- 
 companied by a check upon militarism; for, 
 should the old militarism persist, the division 
 could not be real, the assertion of national and 
 personal individuality could be only imaginary. 
 In fact, no separate part can even will a return 
 to the career or the standpoint of the whole, 
 since to will the repetition is to will its own 
 destruction. Simply, the original expression 
 changes the meaning and will is always loyal 
 to meaning. Yes, I know, that at one time 
 there was thought of reestablishing the Roman 
 Empire, but what historian sees therein any- 
 thing more than at best the repetition of a 
 name .? Repetition can not be literal ; it must 
 
178 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 be evolution also. So, to continue, the assertion 
 of individuality whether national or personal 
 being coincident with the realization of a posi- 
 tive share in the mechanical process of society 
 under an empire, is inseparable from the devel- 
 opment of mechanical skill in the individual. 
 Moreover, it is certain that the mechanical skill 
 so arising will be applied to just that upon 
 which the differentiation or the individuality 
 depends. And upon what is the individuality 
 dependent ? To what does it owe its content, 
 its substantial reality } Certainly not the hu- 
 man, as at the time conceived, since in terms 
 of this alone society is an army, not an organ- 
 ism. What then } Why, the natural or the 
 physical. With the organic division of empire 
 the asserted individuals must turn, nay, they 
 have already turned for expression to their pe- 
 culiar environments, to their peculiarly natural 
 resources. Their individual consciousness has 
 its objective source in a nature that is not hu- 
 man in so far as it differentiates each one of 
 their number from all the others. Accordingly, 
 instead of mechanicalizing the human they 
 mechanicalize the natural; and in doing this 
 let us keep in mind they are only applying 
 the skill, as if an inheritance, which their ori- 
 
SOCIETY'S RESTORATION TO ITSELF. 179 
 
 gin in the imperial army insures to them. Me- 
 chanicaHzation of the natural, however, differ- 
 entiates not only one individual from others 
 but also, specifically, the laborer from the 
 soldier, the skilful, self-active individual from 
 the individual that is only the passive medium 
 of a mechanical process. The laborer as mem- 
 ber of the society that ensues whether of per- 
 sonal or of national individuals is the agency, 
 through which the future, and the soldier, 
 through which the past is contemporized with 
 the present. 
 
 Are illustrations necessary.? Necessary or 
 not, they are very plentiful and as diverse as 
 plentiful. The confessional as it becomes 
 mechanical develops the conscience of the 
 penitent, who becomes himself a master of the 
 ecclesiastical machinery and applies his skill to 
 experience in general. A habit of mind once 
 established is always freed from the special 
 sphere of its training. Religion, furthermore, 
 as it becomes doctrinal or dogmatic, by incul- 
 cating a sense of lawfulness as such, makes 
 science not only possible but inevitable; like 
 Rome in her relation to Spartacus, arming and 
 training an enemy. Monarchy by its very 
 absoluteness becomes democracy, since it has 
 
1 80 PHILOSOPHY OF HI STOP Y. 
 
 to let the people into its secret. A teacher 
 who has a system proves to be only a part of 
 a mechanism which his pupils use skilfully. 
 And, in general, whenever living creatures are 
 subjected to a mechanical process they invari- 
 ably turn upon the process itself and use it to 
 their own individual ends. Always mechanism 
 realizes organism, in the general sphere of the 
 animate relating the living to the inorganic and 
 in society the human to the natural or the 
 civilized to the uncivilized. But the relation 
 must be understood also as both a widening 
 and a deepening of the living or the human or 
 the civilized. Thus, to return to the illustra- 
 tions, Spartacus as enemy of Rome is no longer 
 a slave; the Christian, turned scientist, is not 
 Catholic but Protestant; the obedient subject 
 of a monarch is already a voter; and the wide- 
 awake pupil shares in the teaching. 
 
 So, again, the organic division of empire 
 with its limitation of monarchy and its check 
 to militarism brings the separation of laborer 
 and soldier. Military service is relegated to a 
 special class, the '* standing army." The 
 soldier, however, ceases to be what he had 
 been, since even as a soldier he can not but be 
 the laborer's contemporary. He really turns 
 
SOCIETY'S RESTORATION TO ITSELF. i8l 
 
 laborer himself, being employed by society to 
 do a particular thing and being in his military 
 service at least as much concerned with his 
 wages as with the service itself or being hence- 
 forth more than a mere soldier. Peace instead 
 of war is the object of his maintenance. In 
 brief, then, although visibly he is a sign of the 
 original imperialism, he is also a nationalistic 
 or individualistic factor in the social life. To 
 read the history of the ^ * balance of power ' ' in 
 Europe is to see the struggle of an organic 
 nationalism, an internationalism, to free itself 
 from a persisting imperialism. 
 
 But, the soldier aside, it must not be sup- 
 posed that society suddenly acquires the 
 individual person as a laborer with mechanical 
 skill. The personal members of the empire 
 are long in securing their heritage, for the 
 division begins with nations or classes rather 
 than with persons or at least retrospectively it 
 seems to begin so; so that it can be said with 
 almost scientific exactness that in proportion 
 as the classes are large in size and few in num- 
 ber the power over nature is slight and the 
 expression of it more dependent on the toil of 
 labor-armies than on natural or physical ma- 
 chinery, while in proportion as the division 
 
i82 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 reaches the personal individual the power over 
 nature is great and its expression in a mechan- 
 icalized nature. The history of feudalism 
 shows this. Industrialism, beginning with the 
 beginning of the division of Rome, is seen to 
 be a development from a simple agriculture 
 and a very crude sort of manufacture or from 
 a condition of labor-armies or labor-guilds 
 dependent less on individual skill than on 
 organization to a condition in which even 
 agriculture is elaborate manufacture and in 
 which manufacture in general relies on skill 
 and most complex machinery. Of course, 
 although not always appreciated, the simple 
 industry of the earlier time is not without some 
 conscious measurement of natural resources 
 witness the early systems of rents and all the 
 laws or customs that define in any way the 
 position of the laborer and such measurement 
 always implies some mechanical adaptation of 
 physical force, but in comparison with later 
 times except as it illustrates what has been 
 asserted here this earher mechanical skill is 
 almost insignificant. 
 
 The conscious measurement of natural re- 
 sources, mediating as it does between the human 
 and the natural, is an important incident of the 
 
SOCIETY'S RESTORATION TO ITSELF. 183 
 
 differentiation of soldier and laborer, which we 
 have been neglecting. We had a momentary 
 view of it when we saw that the birth of organ- 
 ism out of mechanism involves the birth of in- 
 dividual consciousness and that this conscious- 
 ness as it rises relates the subjective and the 
 objective, the human and the natural, but we 
 need to look more closely. As implied already, 
 the measurement, the consciousness is at first 
 in classes rather than in individual persons; or, 
 if in individuals, it is in these as monarchical 
 leaders, not as persons; and this can have no 
 other effect than to make the thinking of the 
 time a purely deductive one to the persons 
 themselves. A formal logic, too, has the place 
 of objective science, formal logic being not 
 merely the linguistic or grammatical logic of 
 scholasticism but in general the abstract study 
 of any mere medium of expression. Politics 
 and theology and finance can be quite as scho- 
 lastic as the formal logic in the narrow sense. 
 Thinking in classes, or to recall a school-day 
 memory *' in chorus," and abstraction of the 
 medium of expression and deduction as the 
 ideal reasoning are but three sides of what is a 
 strictly equilateral triangle. But, as a matter 
 of course, induction is not lacking even here, 
 
l84 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 since the classes themselves and the conscious- 
 ness give evidence that individuality has already 
 asserted itself in subject and in object aHke. 
 Moreover, to issue again a well-v^orn caution, 
 the past in which we find a deductive logic, a 
 class-thinking, and an external medium, is only 
 as we see it. This, however, does not make 
 our observations any less worth while. It only 
 enables us to comprehend them better. Abso- 
 lutely, consciousness is always at once induct- 
 ive and deductive, although, if we study history, 
 we have to find the sciences developing from 
 the deductive to the inductive. Historically too 
 and it is chiefly to this that I have been com- 
 ing, since it is so important in an understanding 
 of the relation of industrialism to militarism 
 we can not recognize a consciously inductive 
 and objective thinking until the organic division 
 of empire is seen to have reached just such a 
 personal individuality as we assume for our- 
 selves. Thus, the dimensions of Christendom 
 and the self-consciousness have not changed 
 materially since Descartes on one side and Ba- 
 con on the other formulated the method to 
 which individual thinking still adheres."^ 
 
 In other words, to put the truth of the paragraph differ- 
 ently, thinking, or consciousness, is always both social and in- 
 dividual. Compare the discussion of the social consciousness, 
 p. 109 ff . But historically the thought-process is always seen as 
 from the past and social to the present and individual or as from 
 the deductive to the inductive. 
 
SOCIETY'S RESTORATION TO ITSELF. 185 
 
 But adequately to understand the evolution 
 of the personal laborer we need to go still deeper. 
 The conscious measurement of natural resources 
 upon which expression of mechanical skill de- 
 pends is nothing more nor less than the appli- 
 cation of mathematics to physical phenomena. 
 So long, however, as thinking is deductive and 
 government monarchical, the mathematics ap- 
 plied is mensuration rather than anything else, 
 a mathematics that is not much better than a 
 rule of thumb. Just as politically one person 
 is made the standard for the judgment of all 
 others, so scientifically one particular thing 
 as an abitrary unit is taken as the measure of 
 everything else. Only as thinking becomes 
 personally individual and inductive and objec- 
 tive is a pure mathematics or a pure mechanics 
 possible.* To show just how this is, in the 
 space that can be taken here, is not easy, and 
 yet the truth of it is familiar to all students of 
 history and an historical truth never can be in- 
 
 *Kant is he the last Roman or the first great modern phi- 
 losopher? finds the three primary concepts of mechanics, 
 space and time and causality, only the apriori forms of the 
 individual's objective experience and so reduces all true sci- 
 ence to a pure mechanics. Space and time and causality, 
 however, are also only very general or let us say naturalistic 
 names for the attributes or prerogatives of sovereignty. Space 
 is domain; time, the unity of national self -consciousness, and 
 causality, executive power. 
 
l86 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 capable of explanation. Moreover, the expla- 
 nation which we seek seems to be in the fact 
 that the mathematician, as such, is as imperial 
 as individual, his principles being not less his 
 than everybody's, or that the object studied in 
 mathematics is always a universal individual. 
 Exactly the typical individual, which an induc- 
 tive natural science struggles after through all 
 the subtle device of its experimentation, math- 
 ematics or mechanics has before it from the 
 beginning. Mechanism, always subject to 
 mathematical description, in nature at large as 
 well as in human society presupposes a uni- 
 versal or an imperial individuality. 
 
 Should any one ask me just what the mathe- 
 matician's imperial individual is I should be 
 disposed to reply that at least the best repre- 
 sentative of it is the infinitesimal. Certainly 
 no concept has done more than this to make a 
 pure mathematics or a pure mechanics pos- 
 sible. The infinitesimal is the individual freed 
 from any arbitrary or particular content and 
 by dint of its freedom is as imperial or all- 
 inclusive as individual. In mechanics infinite 
 and finite are all but if not quite identified, and 
 at the risk of seeming extravagantly fanciful I 
 must confess to finding, as well as to believing 
 
SOCIETY'S RESTORATION TO ITSELF. 187 
 
 that any conscientious historian will find a 
 world of meaning in the parallelism between 
 the development of the identification of God 
 with nature and that of the identification in 
 mathematics of the infinite with the finite. 
 Bruno, the Cartesians and Spinoza, who are 
 only the thinkers of their times bringing to 
 consciousness what their fellows effect uncon- 
 sciously or unreflectively, do for theology 
 exactly what their contemporaries, Kepler and 
 Galileo and Newton and Leibnitz do for math- 
 ematics; they discover the other world in this, 
 the divine in the human and natural, the 
 infinite in the finite. Remember, too, that 
 the effect on human society of the conception 
 of the other world as spaceless and timeless,* 
 as wholly immaterial, as strictly a negative of 
 this, is to justify militarism or social mechan- 
 icalism and that only as the other world comes 
 to be found in this is the individual set free in 
 an organic social life; and, remembering this, 
 reflect that by what is more than a mere coin- 
 cidence the differential calculus so fundamental 
 to mechanics and treating the infinite as in- 
 trinsic to the finite is a contemporary not only 
 
 * Obviously the infinitesimal is spaceless and timeless too; 
 as a quantity it is zero itself. 
 
i88 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 of democratic institutions, which define society 
 as an organism, but also of biology, which has 
 the organic for its central idea. In the monad 
 of Leibnitz, moreover, we see and he seems to 
 have seen at once the infinitesimal of mech- 
 anics and the organism of biology. So, as was 
 suggested before, religion not theology is 
 the inspiration of science. It may seem fanci- 
 ful to interpret history in this way, but cer- 
 tainly it is well worth while. 
 
 In our discussion of conscious measurement, 
 of deduction and induction, of mathematics 
 and of the infinitesimal and the monad we 
 seem to have lost sight of the laborer as a per- 
 son mechanically skilful; but he returns to our 
 view as soon as we recall from the preceding 
 chapter what was found to be the relation in 
 society of the laborer and the thinker. In 
 society's experience and progress the thinker 
 does but define what the laborer enacts. The 
 skilful mechanic is the serving contemporary of 
 the science of mechanics; he is a psychological 
 as well as a sociological condition of it. Why, 
 feeble indeed is the thinker who can not read 
 the industrial individualism of Adam Smith in 
 the monadology of Leibnitz. 
 
 But, in conclusion of this rather long discus- 
 
SOCIETY'S RESTORATION TO ITSELF. 189 
 
 sion of the separation of laborer and soldier, 
 of the birth of industrialism in militarism or 
 organism in mechanism, we have now to add 
 to the several incidents already considered the 
 ever greater freedom of communication and 
 transportation between the different parts of 
 the imperial whole. By what means is this 
 freedom secured? Necessarily by the same 
 means to which the developing individuality 
 owes its reality; that is to say, by the mechan- 
 ical application of natural force. It is justice 
 indeed that exactly what makes the individu- 
 ality possible makes possible also the com- 
 munication and transportation, in other words, 
 the commercial exchange, which the individu- 
 ality requires. Am I thinking of the telegraph 
 and the locomotive and the printing-press as 
 naturally contemporary with cotton-gins, with 
 looms and spindles, and with all the complex 
 machinery of agriculture and manufacture? 
 As a matter of course. Locomotive and press, 
 cotton-gin and the others are extremely con- 
 crete, it is true, but they have their place in 
 the philosophy of history. Are we mathe- 
 maticians? Then we can see in them the 
 miraculous infinitesimal through which we 
 have been able to transcend the finiteness of 
 
I90 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 space and time. Are we economists? We see 
 in them the imperial unity of industriaHsm, to 
 which also belongs the same transcendence of 
 spacial and temporal limitations. They do but 
 insure to the individual laborer both his indi- 
 viduality and the imperial sovereignty that he 
 has as his lawful inheritance from the soldier. 
 They give him an imperial as well as an indi- 
 vidual consciousness and an imperial as well as 
 an individual activity. They show how right 
 we were in thinking of the other world, the 
 infinite, as but a principle in this, a corrective 
 of isolation and partiality. 
 
 And now we are ready to turn to the separa- 
 tion of production and exchange, which was 
 also mentioned above in evidence of the rise of 
 the distinction between the individual and the 
 imperial institutions of a social life. This 
 particular separation, moreover, being plainly 
 identical with that of commodity and medium 
 or of machinery and mere nature,* we can 
 consider all three together. Under an extreme 
 militarism the bank, which controls exchange, 
 and the factory,** which controls production, 
 
 * In machinery and mere nature any technically informed 
 philosopher can not fail to see the phenomenal world of scien- 
 tific experience and the thing-in-itself of Kant. 
 
 ** In the sense of any instrument or institution of manu- 
 facture in general. 
 
SOCIETY'S RESTORATION TO ITSELF. 191 
 
 must be one and the same institution, for 
 treasure or mere domain can be the only form 
 of property and possession can be the only 
 basis of the right of property, production in 
 the sense of manufacture having no place. 
 Domain is only the sphere or one might almost 
 say the repository of treasure; and the treas- 
 ure through the vicissitudes of history may 
 include slaves and works of art and literature 
 and other evidences of a past civilization, but 
 its most natural or logical form is the precious 
 metal, which is a very typical part of nature 
 as mere domain and is valuable because natural 
 and relatively indestructible and freely trans- 
 portable and unlimited by any of the special 
 pleasures or interests of mankind. As coin 
 the precious metal is as abstractly universal as 
 the other world itself in which its owners are 
 virtually living. Such production, then, as 
 there is can consist only in getting and in 
 keeping treasure or the domain that contains 
 it or particularly in getting and in keeping 
 coin; and with production so conditioned bank 
 and factory are indeed inseparable and physical 
 force expressed in an army is the machinery 
 with which both the banking and the produc- 
 tion are carried on. 
 
19^ PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY, 
 
 But the conditions of militarism are its own 
 overthrow. The movement of the army 
 relates the other world to this and with the 
 relation the army begins to disband; the sol- 
 diers as soldiers die. Whether we think of 
 Rome as converted to Christianity or of her 
 subjects as surfeited with worldly treasure, we 
 see her fall; we see the disbanding, the differ- 
 entiation of her social machine; we see the 
 other world brought into this. Heaven turned 
 earthly and worldly treasure turned really 
 useful to man and nature turned positively 
 productive: and through such changes factory 
 and bank very much as state and church 
 are separated, and with them commodity and 
 medium, and machinery and nature. 
 
 Of these changes, interesting as they are, I 
 hesitate to speak in much detail, partly because 
 I have already discussed them at considerable 
 length in another book,^ but chiefly because I 
 do not find the detailed discussion of them 
 necessary to my present purposes. Still I 
 must add a little to the foregoing, for there is 
 one circumstance, connected particularly with 
 the separation of medium and commodity, that 
 is of peculiar interest. That the bank as a 
 
 * Citizenship and Salvation^ pp. 92-102 and 129-136. 
 
SOCIETY'S RESTORATION TO ITSELF. 193 
 
 separate institution is one of the vital incidents 
 of the transition from the old militarism to the 
 present industrialism is a well-known fact of 
 history and that the factory has developed with 
 the bank is another. The bank's function, 
 moreover, is one of exchange among individuals 
 either through its bills of deposit or through 
 the loans by which it makes production pos- 
 sible, while the factory is the great agent of 
 production; and each is, to recall a refrain, 
 invisibly what the other is visibly. It is also 
 equally well known to the historian that with 
 the development of industrialism coin becomes 
 valuable only as one commodity among others, 
 while in its capacity of medium of exchange it 
 approaches ever nearer to being a mere symbol 
 or economic figure-head. Its transfiguration 
 or translation is quite comparable with that of 
 the political or ecclesiastical monarch contem- 
 porary with it. In finance, moreover, and 
 this is what I have had specially in mind, the 
 change is not without its conflict of dogmatism 
 and heresy. Just as there is the conflict of 
 ecclesiasticism and atheism and of absolutism 
 and anarchy so there is that of metalism and 
 fiatism;* and as always in cases of conflict the 
 
 *Is this a new word? I am not sure. Of course the 
 reference is to the heresy of "fiat-money." 
 
194 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 right is on neither side. ReHgion, for exam- 
 ple, is neither orthodoxy nor agnosticism but 
 the faith that is also works; the natural sover- 
 eignty is neither in a personal monarch nor in 
 the separate members of society but in the life 
 of all as a social life; and similarly in finance 
 the real medium of exchange is neither a pre- 
 cious metal, however stable, nor a bit of paper, 
 however stamped, but what the business world 
 knows as credit credit of the sort that really 
 ** turns the wheels of industry." So long, then, 
 as militarism persists, threatening or positively 
 encumbering the life of an industrial society, 
 the dogma of metalism will persist too, and 
 with it the heresy of fiatism, but the very con- 
 flict of these two, involved as it is in the devel- 
 opment of a free industrialism or in what we 
 have been calling the restoration of society to 
 itself, is the earnest of a genuine credit becom- 
 ing the medium of exchange. 
 
 In an organic freely industrial society pro- 
 ductive power, not possession, constitutes the 
 right to property. So long, however, as any 
 particular commodity even gold ! serves as 
 the medium, there remains some right in mere 
 possession. But credit becoming the medium 
 alters the case materially. And exactly what 
 
SOCIETY'S RESTORATION TO ITSELF. 195 
 
 is credit ? It is not something that can ever 
 be hoarded. It is not something that can ever 
 be lent. It is certainly not any bare say-so. 
 What then 1 It is a medium of exchange and 
 of nothing but exchange. It is financial or 
 commercial intelligence. It is the social con- 
 sciousnesswhich is as individual as social 
 of the productive capacity of the social life.* 
 For credit to succed a metal or metals as the 
 medium of exchange a prompt and accurate 
 communication is necessary among all the parts, 
 however distant or however rural, of the com- 
 mercial world; and the bank, not as a treasure- 
 house, not as an institution merely of loans and 
 deposits, but as an institution that operates 
 only in credit instruments and the intelligence 
 on which they are based, must be available to 
 every part and every person of the social 
 whole. 
 
 Am I understood here } If I am, a perfectly 
 logical connection will be evident among these 
 different things that follow: geographical cen- 
 tralization, arbitrary class-distinctions, irre- 
 
 * Credit, as here defined, is to be associated closely with 
 machinery. The two are but the inseparable aspects of an in- 
 dustrial life or, as Spinza would have put it, the parallel attri- 
 butes of one substance. Credit is industrialism on the side of 
 mind or thought; machinery, on the side of matter or exten- 
 sion. 
 
196 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 sponsible personal leadership, artificially pro- 
 tected capital, ignorant and unskilled labor, 
 dogmatic when not heretical metalism* in fi- 
 nance, communication and transportation that 
 is neither socially nor geographically general 
 and that is inaccurate or insecure as well as 
 incomplete, corrupt poHtics, and not to extend 
 a list that is of indefinite length abstract or 
 laissez-faire science. Certainly a remarkable 
 jumble ! And to it might be added a sectarian 
 time-serving religion, a sensational machine- 
 controlled newspaper, a social code that in 
 public and in private takes the will for the deed 
 and so sanctions incapacity in office and senti- 
 mentality in morals generally, and literal ** in- 
 heritance both of social position and private 
 character. But I was not to extend the list. 
 In it, however, we have a veritable photograph 
 or rather a photographic * * negative ' ' of our 
 own time ; as it were, the system of shadows 
 cast by the light of society's restoration to 
 itself. And in it we have also a summary his- 
 tory of Christendom. 
 
 * Heretical metalism has fiatism for its limit. Of course 
 dogmatism is always a justification of heresy. 
 
 ** ** Literal " inheritance is the inheritance of a persistent 
 character or status, of a character or status that continues in 
 the offspring to be literally what it was in the parent. 
 
SOCIETY'S RESTORATION' TO ITSELF. I97 
 
 But as further evidence of the development of 
 the distinction between individual and imperial 
 institutions in the social life, a development 
 that we found coincident with the process of 
 restoration, there were mentioned above, as 
 will be remembered, two other cases of differ- 
 entiation, the case oijus civile diWd jus gentium 
 and the case of science and religion. Of these, 
 however, nothing more can be said here. Sci- 
 ence and religion are to be treated in a separate 
 chapter ; and the history of jurisprudence must 
 speak for itself, although I might add to the 
 illustration given the simple fact that the devel- 
 opment of equity, as distinct from the common 
 law, is contemporaneous with that of interna- 
 tional law. Both equity and international law 
 make one and the same appeal. They appeal, 
 not to the traditional or socially conventional 
 and instituted but to the widely human and 
 natural. Accordingly they serve organism in- 
 stead of mechanism in the relations of men. 
 
 Finally, there are certain incidents, not 
 yet referred to, of that special phase of the 
 process of restoration which has been called 
 here the naturalization of the supernatural, and 
 to these we must now give some attention. 
 Thus, as not the least important although pos- 
 
198 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 sibly the least obvious among the unnoticed 
 incidents of the naturalization of the supernat- 
 ural, there is barbarian invasion. In history 
 we see barbarian hordes overcoming Rome 
 almost at the moment of her conversion to 
 Christianity, and so preventing her Christian 
 idealism from becoming idle and abstract or 
 unworldly. At just the time, when the church 
 has been separated from the state* and has 
 completed its organization and systematized its 
 doctrines, the barbarians appear, as if the mes- 
 sengers of nature or shall we not say it } of 
 God himself, to insure usefulness or applica- 
 tion. The Imperial City has the thought and 
 the will; they supply the necessity and the 
 force. The visible Rome, already in decay, 
 they easily overcome; while the church masters 
 them, yet not without adapting and this 
 means naturalizing its machinery. The adap- 
 tation, moreover, or the naturalization ends in 
 Protestantism ; or more strictly the invasion 
 itself is the beginning of the Protestant Refor- 
 mation, the barbarian invaders, even at their 
 conversion to Roman Catholisim, being the 
 first Protestants. 
 
 Conspicuously by the division of Rome into an Eastern 
 and a Western Empire. 
 
SOCIETY'S RESTORATION TO ITSELF. 199 
 
 And, if invasion brings naturalization and 
 Protestantism, learning, in spite of its cloist- 
 ered seclusion and literature and painting 
 in spite of their sacred subjects and archi- 
 tecture in spite of its limitation to places of 
 worship and pilgrimage in spite of its desti- 
 nation bring them also. All these, moreover, 
 are the means the church finds necessary in its 
 career of conversion and adaptation; argu- 
 ments, I like to call them, when I try to com- 
 prehend the reasoning in the complex all- 
 inclusive history of Christendom, from the 
 natural to the supernatural. And they are 
 certainly very effective arguments, being of the 
 sort that justify by fulfilling without idola- 
 trously perpetuating what they would defend. 
 Also in what might well be called the return of 
 Greece and Judea, in the influx of Greek schol- 
 ars and the revival of Greek learning and in 
 the rise to prominence and power of the Jewish 
 banker, we see not only an effective argument 
 from the natural to the supernatural but also 
 a movement that makes the process of society's 
 restoration to itself seem almost a literal one. 
 To use Milton's words, Greece and Judea are 
 * * lost ' ' only to be * * regained. ' ' 
 
 Protestantism, moreover, in the end awakened 
 
200 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 to the full force of its own arguments and so be- 
 come a necessity of the personal consciousness, 
 declares in all the ways of its expression that, 
 since human experience is the only justifica- 
 tion, the other world must be here and now ; 
 and in realization of this declaration, in fulfilment 
 of all sorts of prophecies of the millenium and 
 satisfaction of all sorts of political air-castles 
 America takes her place as an organic part of 
 Christendom. The invasion, that has natural- 
 ized Catholicism, Protestantism turns into 
 exploration and discovery, and in history no 
 argument from the natural to the supernatural 
 is more telling than this of the discovery of 
 America. In the discovery of America, too, 
 not more for what it has realized in the new 
 world than for what it. has brought about in 
 in the old, we have most positively expressed 
 for what but this have we found democracy 
 and industrialism and liberty of belief to sig- 
 nify } the restoration of society to itself. 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 
 PROGRESS IN THE ACTIVITY OF SOCIETY. 
 
 ALIENATION and restoration, traced in the 
 last two chapters as altogether distinct 
 stages in the life of society, are in reality like 
 Heraclitus' '^wayup" and ''way down." They 
 are * * the same. ' ' Indeed the dark philosopher 
 himself may be imagined to say of them 
 that in the fire of social progress each is 
 as a back-log to the other. Were the relation 
 less close, were they in any way separate, the 
 progress of society could never satisfy the de- 
 mands that our thinking has made upon the 
 conception of progress. Simply, progress is 
 not genuine if not both conservative and rad- 
 ical.* 
 
 The intimacy of the two processes was man- 
 ifested to us in the fact that the same agencies 
 could be appealed to in explanation of them 
 both. Thus, the art of Greece alienated; the 
 
 * Here it can hardly be necessary to say, because virtually 
 it is to reiterate, that in general only the activity of an organ- 
 ism, in which unity and difference are identified, can be both 
 conservative and radical. For an organism to be is to progress. 
 
202 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 art of Christendom restored. Art, however, 
 and all the other expressions of society's reflec- 
 tion upon the social life always both alienate 
 and restore; they must ever do one in doing 
 the other. The art of Christendom has cer- 
 tainly revived a life that had seemed dead, 
 restoring an earlier civilization to the con- 
 sciousness and activity of the present, but also 
 and with no less truth it has brought a ration- 
 alism and a criticism that are alienating Christ- 
 endom from itself. Moreover, at risk of 
 seeming only verbally gymnastic, we need to 
 add that the alienated Christendom has been 
 taking the restored Greece and Judea with it, 
 so that it is as if the past's rebirth were the 
 present's death. Has not the self-consciousness 
 of Christendom made both Greek history and 
 Jewish history essential to Christian history, 
 and in doing this has it not also given both 
 Greek and Jew an active share in the life of 
 Christendom } To face our paradox boldly, 
 the old, the long-ago, is not dead but lives in 
 the new, while the new dies as the old revives. 
 Frequently it is said that history repeats 
 itself, but that is not what I am saying here. 
 What thoughtful person would say of a runner 
 that in his successive strides he was constantly 
 
PROGRESS IN ACTIVITY OF SOCIETY. 203 
 
 repeating himself? No race is a series of 
 repeated strides and no history, or no evolu- 
 tion, however rhythmic, is a series of repeated 
 ** moments." Any movement, that of racing 
 or that of human progress, is an absolutely 
 indivisible whole; what we may choose to see 
 as the action of a moment or a part is in 
 reality all-inclusive; and, this being true, to 
 speak of repetition in the runner's race or in 
 man's history is to be even worse than thought- 
 less. The present never repeats the past, for 
 the past is a related part of the life of the 
 present. What is memory, forsooth, but a 
 peculiar consciousness accompanying certain 
 disturbances in a body that is all together and 
 all at once? 
 
 How can I make myself clear? We are so 
 accustomed to divide time into intervals, and 
 in the intervals to see a series of successive 
 processes, that any other demands upon our 
 thinking are grossly fanciful if not hopelessly 
 unintelligible. They seem to promise nothing 
 but paradoxes, and to many paradoxes are as 
 stones when bread is wanted. But paradoxes, 
 like stones, have an important r61e in human 
 life. Thus, as regards the present discussion, 
 we have found another than a composite divis- 
 
204 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 ible time in which to read history and in spite 
 of the paradoxes that it leads us into the new 
 reading feeds our thought. In time, as we 
 have found it, there is always a backward 
 as well as a forward movement or quite with- 
 out the verbal contradiction activity is always 
 organic differentiation. Any process of the 
 present, then, notably the social movement of 
 Christendom, must be as if filling the time of 
 all human history. 
 
 And here do but revive some of our earlier 
 general conclusions. ' * The life of the present 
 and the life of the past are wrongly thought of 
 as two lives. . . . Not those that are now 
 gone once lived and we live, but they and we 
 are living; they in us and we with them." 
 * * Life or action in its temporal sequences is 
 but the continuous expression of the persistent 
 relations of coexistences. ' ' The individual 
 person or nation or civilization is a ''vital 
 relation, "an ' ' organic function, * ' that ' ' trans- 
 cends any mere bounds of space and time" and 
 that ' * has an immortality that is as substantial 
 and inviolable as the universe itself. ' ' 
 
 Restoration, in the light now upon it, is not 
 far from being equivalent to the organic recap- 
 itulation of the past. It is the process by 
 
PROGRESS IN ACTIVITY OF SOCIETY. 205 
 
 which the past is related to the present and 
 changed as the relation demands. And aliena- 
 tion, in its turn, is the organic anticipation of 
 the future. The two, moreover, mutually 
 dependent and inseparable as they are, do but 
 show that contemporization of past and future 
 with the present which we saw to be so essen- 
 tial to a truly progressive activity. Yes, they 
 are stages or moments of progress, as already 
 they have been treated here; given a particular 
 ideal or standard to determine one's judgment, 
 as when one has regard to a particular history, 
 for example the history of Christendom, and 
 they are bound to appear in a temporal series; 
 but they are always contemporaneous as well 
 as successive, one being always active in the 
 other. Day and night could not be more truly 
 both contemporary and successive than they. 
 In short, then, as has been asserted here so 
 often in one way or another, the new is not 
 less alive in the present than the old; as in 
 walking, so in human history, so in the evolu- 
 tion of life generally. Everywhere the activity 
 that is also progress reaches forward and out- 
 ward at the same time that it reaches backward 
 and inward. Advance always involves d. pres- 
 ent animation or more specifically with refer- 
 
2o6 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 ence to human affairs a present civilization at 
 once of the prehistoric past and of the Hfeless 
 or unciviHzed or shall we not say the post- 
 historic future; it brings into recognition and 
 more vital expression what had seemed tempo- 
 rally and spatially external. When has human 
 progress been without both a new conscious- 
 ness of an ever earlier civilization and a devel- 
 oped sympathy for still uncivilized parts? 
 Progress seems to mean realization of the 
 future through glorification or at least justifica- 
 tion of the past. What, for example, has 
 meant more to Christianity than its discovery 
 of a pre-Christian existence.^ And, with 
 regard to what is spatially external, it was 
 surely the more inclusive life of the Mediter- 
 ranean that so intensified and deepened the 
 life of Greece and Judaea as to set them quite 
 beside themselves, and today it is a more 
 inclusive life that is alienating Christendom. 
 Here is not exactly the place for prophecy,^ 
 but there seems to be a general agreement that 
 the future of Christendom is in some substan- 
 tial way to involve the life of the un-Christia'n 
 Orient, and the reasons are many for attribut- 
 ing the present alienation to the Eastern Ques- 
 tion. This Eastern Question, it is not necessary 
 
PROGRESS IN ACTIVITY OF SOCIETY. 207 
 
 to say, is and always has been a concrete con- 
 dition as well as a question, a living relation- 
 ship as well as a consciously formulated prob- 
 lem, and besides being political it has been also 
 economic and psychological and theological. 
 Christianity came from the East, and with it 
 came other gifts. Perhaps, then, it is not so 
 extravagant, as it may seem at first, to imagine 
 that the East, taken for what it has meant both 
 historically and geographically, both spiritually 
 and materially, is the cause of the lights and 
 shadows that we found in the conditions of our 
 present life. The sense of isolation, the con- 
 sciousness of unfulfilled responsibilities, always 
 makes both lights and shadows, and it is cer- 
 tain that no one in the Occident has been free 
 from such a consciousness since the beginning 
 of the Christian era. 
 
 But I may get mystical, if I go on. True, 
 there are times when clearness is a fault. 
 Enough, however, if in the complex phenomena 
 of history which we have been studying we 
 have found presented to us only a wonderfully 
 magnified illustration of what progress is * ' the 
 timeless because defining and contemporizing 
 law of the past, whether as thought or as en- 
 vironment, becoming the motive, which is only 
 
^ PHIL O SOPHY OF HIS TOR Y. 
 
 the defined and contemporized future, of the 
 all-including present. ' ' Confessedly, a rather 
 forbidding formula, and it does not improve 
 much with its repetitions, but after all, as we 
 often say of our uncomely friends, ' * handsome 
 is that handsome does. ' ' 
 
Part III. 
 HISTORICTL STUDIES. 
 
CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 REASON AND RELIGION. 
 
 THE lig^hts and shadows that mean aliena- 
 tion or restoration, according to the 
 direction of our looking, and that somehow, 
 let us say because of the necessities of vision 
 or the laws of optics, prevent our undivided 
 attention in either direction, are nowhere more 
 striking than in the relation of reason and 
 religion. In fact it would not be difficult to 
 reduce all history to what is sometimes called 
 the conflict between the two, and if history 
 were so reduced the life that is would naturally 
 appear in the same form. For religion and 
 reason what are they but action or impulse 
 and inaction or consciousness.? And their con- 
 flict what but that between impulse and 
 consciousness .J* 
 
 Reason is sometimes identified with science. 
 It is, however, as used here, a more general 
 term, being synonymous with thought. Science 
 we have found to be but one moment in a pro- 
 cess of thought or reason that has control, 
 
^12 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 or inhibition, as one of its incidents and activity 
 merely for activity's sake as the other and that 
 expresses itself politically in the development 
 of distinct classes, notably the leisured think- 
 ing classes and the mechanically living working 
 classes and geographically in the rise of an 
 urban and the decay of the rural civilization. 
 Other moments, as will be recalled, are legis- 
 lation, art, and philosophy, science coming 
 between the last two. The conflict of reason 
 and religion, therefore, or of science and 
 religion, begins with the beginning of this pro- 
 cess, with the appearance of a thinking class 
 and the development of the city. 
 
 But, furthermore, it must be kept in mind 
 that those two incidents, control and activity 
 for its own sake or mechanical activity are not 
 strictly two but one essentially, being func- 
 tionally or organically related. Each of the 
 two is psychologically and sociologically a con- 
 dition of the other, and in this unity they 
 really give evidence of the rise among the 
 people of a life, an activity, that promises to 
 relate the people intimately and positively to 
 what at the beginning they imagine is quite 
 alien to them. Thus, in course of time, the 
 thinkers lose their patriotism and the city even 
 
REASON AND RELIGION, 213 
 
 avows cosmopolitanism; the laborers pass into 
 socialists of some kind and the country becomes 
 the home of foreigners. In other words, the 
 conscious control and the mechanical and 
 relatively unconscious activity for its own sake, 
 which makes the consciousness possible, are 
 themselves for the sake of the more inclusive, 
 the deeper and the broader life that is inducing 
 the change. At first, as was said, the people 
 may view their abstract thinking and their 
 mechanical living as means of mere defense, 
 but gradually and inevitably there arises a 
 more positive interest in what seems to be 
 opposing them and with this their treachery, 
 which is also something else, asserts itself and 
 the self-consciousness and conventional living 
 give way to the new life. 
 
 And what has religion to do here.? Well, I 
 must repeat that religion, which has ^o do with 
 action or impulse, and reason, which has to do 
 with inaction or consciousness, come to be 
 distinguished in the social life only as country 
 and city or as labor and thought are distin- 
 guished. Religion identifies itself chiefly with 
 those that work. Geographically it has its 
 
214 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 stronghold in the rural districts.* Religion and 
 reason, then, must be organically one, socio- 
 logically and psychologically dependent; and 
 the moments in the development of religion 
 must be thoroughly sympathetic with those in 
 the development of reason. Thus, religion 
 must move, and the historian knows that it 
 does move, through ecclesiastical polity and 
 aesthetic ritualism to ** rational" theology, 
 while reason passes through jurisprudence and 
 art to exact science, and in either case the 
 process is one of alienation. Moreover, when 
 the two have reached their third moments, 
 society begins to feel and comes in course of 
 time to say that religion is not rational theol- 
 ogy or that the religious life is not ecclesiasti- 
 cism, and that reason or thought is not abstract 
 science or science only for science's sake, and 
 with this awakening religion is seen to turn 
 * ' liberal, ' ' keeping the letter but affirming only 
 the spirit, and science to turn * * positivistic, ' ' 
 keeping the formulae but only as ' * working 
 
 * That I am here making the case simpler than it really is 
 I am well aware, but I am hardly likely to be misuaderstood. 
 The distinctions that I make depend on differences of an or- 
 ganic life in society, not on the exclusive or isolating differences 
 of a merely composite life. Religion has its own thinkers, the 
 theologians, just as science has its own laborers, the mechanics, 
 and religion and science are also geographically coextensive. 
 
REASON AND RELIGION. 215 
 
 hypotheses." In short, a motive to philoso- 
 phy is in the consciousness of the people, and 
 there appear in society, as if visible exponents 
 of the change, religious spirits, vAxo have as 
 their ideal the application to life itself, to social 
 conditions, to human needs, of scientific ideas 
 or principles. These pioneers, however, who 
 are independent alike of the church and of the 
 school or university, are doomed to fail par- 
 tially, when not wholly, in their longing to 
 bring impulse and consciousness, religion and 
 reason together, for on the one hand they lack 
 the necessary machinery and on the other the 
 necessary understanding to make their labor 
 effective. They are would-be reformers, the 
 laborers or servants of philosophy, but the 
 society to which they belong, being still at 
 least formally orthodox and conservative, 
 damns them and hinders them by finding them 
 irreligious or even atheistic and unscientific or 
 even cranky and quack. Perhaps nothing 
 shows the alienation of society from itself so 
 emphatically as this appearance of non- 
 religious or non-ecclesiastical religion and 
 non-scientific or non-academic science. It 
 is, moreover, as we know, an earnest of the 
 last moment in the process of alienation, when 
 
2l6 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 alienation is manifestly restoration; the mo- 
 ment of religion and reason, impulse and con- 
 sciousness, identified; the moment, in a word, 
 when change or even revolution or shall we 
 not say? transfiguration comes, not exactly 
 to the life of society, but to the body, to the 
 institutions. 
 
 The foregoing sketch, rapid and concise as 
 it is, suffices to show that the conflict, so much 
 talked of, is not of religion and reason but of 
 theology, which is religion alienated from itself, 
 and of science, which is reason alienated from 
 itself, and that the alienation in either case is 
 a perfectly natural incident of a society's strug- 
 gle with itself, of the tension of a society's 
 effort at expression or adjustment. In justifi- 
 cation of this too much emphasis can not be 
 laid on the unity of spirit, the formal unity, 
 which has been indicated, of the two opponents. 
 Unity of form or spirit in the contestants is 
 really a law of all conflict. Thus, to add to 
 what has been said above, as regards theology 
 and science, both are rationalistic; both are 
 dogmatic; both would have it that their form- 
 ulae or creeds are ends in themselves; and both 
 are abstract and unsocial, professional and in- 
 stitutional. The liberalism which passes into 
 
REASON AND RELIGION 217 
 
 a virtual agnosticism of the one is quite in line 
 with the positivism of the other. If one is 
 only sentimental in what it does, being so spir- 
 itual as to be thoroughly material, as when 
 charity is confined to gifts of money, and is in 
 consequence as likely to do harm as to do good, 
 the other is at the same time cold and indiffer- 
 ent, or laissez faire, and so from its side quite 
 as harmful as helpful. But, agreeing so re- 
 markably in all these ways, how do they differ.? 
 Only in visible content; in the architecture of 
 their buildings, the personnel of their followers, 
 and the matter of their preaching. Some one 
 objects, bidding me to remember, among many 
 other things, the wide difference, spiritual as 
 well as material, between the doctrines of 
 Christianity and those of evolution. I have to 
 reply, however, that it is not at all fanciful to 
 read the doctrines of orthodox theology in those 
 of evolution or of science generally.* Sponta- 
 neous genesis is only science for creation; genus 
 or species is only science for church or sect; 
 and chance for miracle, the exact law or form- 
 ula for the intuited dogma, the force-endowed 
 
 * See an article in The Monist^ Jan., 1899, ''Evolution 
 Evolved A Philosophical Chriticism;" also, in The Philo- 
 sophical Review^ July, 1898, "Epistemology and Physical 
 Science A Fatal Paralleliim. " 
 
2i8 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 atom or the vital unit for the soul-endowed 
 body, and so on indefinitely. So, implicitly 
 or metaphysically, the teachings of science and 
 the teachings of theology are not essentially 
 different, however wide apart they may be ex- 
 ternally. But the external, the material differ- 
 ence does it amount to nothing ? Of course 
 it amounts to something. It makes the conflict 
 real, the formal unity being that which makes 
 it only possible; or rather the formal unity and 
 material difference show how each of the op- 
 ponents is as much in conflict with itself as 
 with anything outside. How else explain the 
 dogmatism of the one or the positivism of the 
 other } The inefficient activity of the one or 
 the efficient inactivity of the other } The clois- 
 tered and scheduled ritual of the one or what 
 shall I say } the physical exercise of the other.** 
 And the conflict of theology and science, 
 whether with themselves or with each other, 
 only shows how a society as well as an individ- 
 ual person must always look before it leaps. 
 The conflict is the looking. Impulse keeps its 
 traditional motives hence the dogmatism of 
 theology until science becomes really applica- 
 ble, and thought has to be equally out of touch 
 with reality, equally formal and abstract, until 
 
REASON AND RELIGION. 219 
 
 its own accuracy has changed it from knowl- 
 edge into motive. But let these changes be real- 
 ized, and action is freed from mere doing, from 
 mere ritual, and identified with thinking, and 
 thought from mere science and identified with 
 action; the word becomes incarnate. 
 
 But science is the limit of art, and in view 
 of the undisputed intimacy between art and 
 religion it is worth our while to see in just what 
 way art persists in science. Curiously enough 
 art and science never seem fully in sympathy 
 with each other, the limit appearing to outgrow 
 its own origin. The difference between the 
 two is closely parallel with that between man 
 and nature, the subjective and the objective. 
 Science would eliminate the human altogether, 
 and so be literally objective or naturalistic. 
 When all is said, however, science is by no 
 means so far from art as it often imagines itself. 
 Thus, as all agree, art objectifies human life or 
 human experience, putting its achievements on 
 the stage of consciousness, dramatizing its 
 struggle and its victories, exposing it, and re- 
 vealing in it a law or a will that is superior to 
 human law or human will, but does this in ma- 
 terial that is either visibly human or sensuously, 
 subjectively stimulating to the human; and 
 
220 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY, 
 
 science also objectifies and dramatizes human 
 life, but in the natural. Science sees men as 
 animals or even as mere bodies; society as only 
 a genus or species, or as a group of atoms or 
 molecules; activity as mere natural life or even 
 as physical motion ; and death as only so much 
 change. Science, then, is art with a microscope. 
 The laboratory is its theater; the report or 
 contribution, its novel or its poem; the diagram, 
 its painting; and the equation, which literally 
 reduces everything to nothing, at once its com- 
 edy and its tragedy. But being art at its limit 
 or art with the distinction betwen man and 
 nature or subject and object become the merest 
 convention, science fails to find even a suspic- 
 ion of personality in the superior will or law 
 that it reveals. Art is always teleological, cre- 
 ationalistic; but science recognizes and realizes 
 the implied fatalism, preserving what is at best 
 only a formal teleology, regarding all that is 
 ultimate as absolutely unknowable. 
 
 But, finally, art is the new transcending with- 
 out surrendering the old; a radical conserva- 
 tism; lawlessness persistently lawful; cosmo- 
 politanism or naturalism remaining patriotic or 
 humanistic. This is art, and science is its last 
 word, its dying message. Rational theology, 
 
REASON AND RELIGION. 321 
 
 then, contemporary with science, is also the 
 last word, the concluding rite of a sensuous 
 ceremonial. And thought and religion, being 
 each real because in and of the other, follow 
 quickly; the new becomes free and active; the 
 human identifies itself with the natural, with 
 the world-reason, and through the identification 
 finds the natural personal. 
 
 So we make reason religious and religion ra- 
 tional. The two are one in the Incarnate Word, 
 which restores or redeems man, while it changes 
 or even destroys his political and geographical 
 devices. 
 
CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 GOOD AND EVIL. 
 
 I I ISTORY may be seen also as a conflict of 
 good and evil; and, if history, then the 
 present too. 
 
 Sometimes this conflict is regarded as be- 
 tween distinct forces or beings, sometimes 
 more abstractly as between the spiritual and 
 the material, sometimes as between the human 
 and the natural, sometimes as between differ- 
 ent classes of living creatures or still more nar- 
 rowly of human beings, but no one of these 
 numerous views is adequate to the conception 
 of history at which we have arrived. All of 
 these are but one in this respect. They make 
 the good and the evil separate and independent 
 and turn the conflict into one of either annihi- 
 lation or exclusion, whereas from our stand- 
 point history, which is the liberation of activity 
 in its own realized law, can admit neither the 
 annihilation nor the exclusion of any one of its 
 incidents. Conflict that annihilates or excludes 
 is meaningless to us. 
 
GOOD AND EVIL. 223 
 
 And equally inadequate to our conception of 
 history is the notion, not uncommon today, 
 that the good and the evil are wholly relative 
 to times and conditions. As usually understood 
 this is only another way of making the conflict 
 meaningless, since it makes the good and the 
 evil themselves unreal or unsubstantial. 
 
 But, if the good and the evil are neither self- 
 existent and absolute nor relative, what can 
 they be 1 Indeed is there any third view of 
 them open to us ? There is this possibility. 
 The distinction between the two may be real 
 and substantial, being a necessary incident or a 
 necessary experience of all activity ; a real 
 incident, then, or a real experience of all life. 
 Is this consistent with history as the liberation 
 of activity in its own realized law } It certainly 
 is. History, so conditioned, can never be free 
 from the tension of a lawful expression of itself, 
 from the conflict of the good as lawfulness and 
 the evil as lawlessness. Moreover, just be- 
 cause the mere expression of activity must 
 always bring a clearer consciousness of its con- 
 ditions, the lawful and the lawless, although 
 always significant can be neither absolute nor 
 relative. In fact lawfulness, when for its own 
 sake, is become lawless and lawlessness as inde- 
 
224 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 pendence of mere convention is lawful. The 
 two, in short, are always necessarily distin- 
 guished, but neither of them exists by itself or 
 in mere antithesis to the other. They are the 
 differentiated conditions of a life or an activity 
 that, being indivisible, gives to all of its condi- 
 tions mutual dependence and determination. 
 They are neither absolute nor relative, because 
 themselves a relation. Of them, as we see 
 them opposed, we have to say that each is 
 invisibly whatever the other is visibly or in 
 another formula which is directly applicable to 
 the distinction of the good and the bad in so- 
 ciety and which is also getting to be one of our 
 refrains that each is psychologically and soci- 
 ologically dependent on the other. 
 
 Here we shall have to confine ourselves to 
 the conflict of good and evil as a social phen- 
 omenon, although whatever is said can not but 
 be applicable mutatis mutandis in natural 
 science as interested in good and evil in nature 
 or in psychology and ethics as interested in 
 good and evil in the personal individual. 
 Society only mediates between nature and the 
 individual. 
 
 In the first place, then, the consciousness of 
 evil or, as indicated above, of lawlessness, is 
 
GOOD AND EVIL. ^25 
 
 natural to a progressive social life for the reason 
 that a life, whose expression defines the 
 knowledge of its conditions, can not fail to 
 discover evil in itself; and this consciousness 
 has the form of condemnation or resentment. 
 A progressive life is ever condemning itself. 
 The evil, however, is evil only as it is discov- 
 ered; it is evil only with the retrospection. 
 The condemnation, too, is never without 
 approval also, the despair over recognized evil 
 never without a sense of good. A Hfe that 
 knows its evil is inherently, it is already 
 actively and materially good. 
 
 But true as this is it must not for a moment 
 be understood to mean that either the approval 
 or the condemnation is of specific activities or 
 ways of expression, for under all the conditions 
 no way of expression, whether as manifested 
 in an individual or as manifested in a particular 
 group or class, can be good or bad in itself. 
 No way of expression can be so independent of 
 the changing life as to require either restraint 
 or cultivation for the sake of anything intrinsic 
 to its isolated self. Let us not forget that the 
 liberation of a society's life in its own realized 
 law, not the loss nor yet the addition or the 
 mere perpetuation of any particular thing, is 
 
226 PHIL O SOPHY OF HISTOR Y. 
 
 progress. Condemnation, then, and approval 
 are both formally and materially inseparable 
 and complementary phases of the conscious- 
 ness that life induces and that would make life 
 ever more at one with itself, ever more consis- 
 tent, ever more organic. Even with regard to 
 the objects upon which they are directed they 
 are mutually inclusive, they are coextensive. 
 
 This is hard to understand, but to the his- 
 torian there is the very clearest evidence of it 
 in the way in which the two opposing classes 
 of society, the good and the bad, the law- 
 abiding and the lawless, literally involve each 
 other. Only a short time ago it was remarked 
 that lawfulness for its own sake, which is just 
 what makes the distinction between the con- 
 sciously good and those who are said to be 
 bad, is lawlessness, and that lawlessness, sep- 
 arating the consciously bad from the good, is 
 lawfulness, but a much more direct and per- 
 haps a much more sensational way of saying 
 the same thing is that what is good and what 
 is bad in society are never under any circum- 
 stances to be identified with separate social 
 classes. In a society that is an organism all 
 are good together and all are bad together. 
 The distinctions of classes mark, not a conflict 
 
GOOD AND EVIL. 227 
 
 merely of separate parts with each other, but a 
 conflict rather of each part with itself or of 
 society as an organic whole with itself. 
 
 The illustrations of this almost if not quite 
 startling truth are both numerous and con- 
 vincing. Thus, such in society as identify 
 themselves with a laissez-faire science are evil 
 to those who are identified with ecclesiasticism 
 and theological dogmatism. The theism of 
 the latter finds only atheism in the former. 
 But it is an old story to us that each is what- 
 ever the other is, that the two are organically 
 one, being mutually determining incidents of 
 the same life. And, under precisely the same 
 conditions, a silver-heresy is evil to a gold- 
 orthodoxy, or in general fiatism to metalism; 
 pleasure-seeking is evil to asceticism; reckless, 
 unskilled labor, to thoughtless and masterful 
 capital; adultery, to marriage under the law; 
 murder, to hanging; gambling, to revelation 
 and miracle; thieving, to business "honesty;" 
 talent, to genius; leisure, to industry; theory, 
 to practice; "Christian" science, to material 
 or "physical" science; profanity, to cant; 
 barbarian, to Greek; Jew, to Christian. Sim- 
 ply the life of society can not bring or involve 
 these differences without having them depend- 
 
228 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 ent on each other and intrinsic to each other. 
 When in history, political or economical, the- 
 ological or moral, have the good in society 
 condemned the bad without finding themselves 
 condemned also? The good are indeed the 
 saviours of society, but only as they find its 
 sins in themselves. And when have the bad 
 approved the good without finding themselves 
 approved also? The bad do indeed share in 
 the salvation, for a self-condemned society 
 always forgives their sinfulness and takes 
 them to itself. 
 
 That the law-abiding are parties to the 
 transgression in the life of society and the 
 transgressors to the lawfulness is an idea that 
 is too true to the spirit of our times not to be 
 recognized and accepted as soon as it has been 
 clearly stated. Aside from the fact that ever 
 since Christ was declared to have saved his 
 fellows by taking their sins idolatry, for 
 example, murder, dishonor of parents, and 
 adultery upon himself and glorifying them,* 
 society has felt with a growing keenness that 
 responsibility both for the evil and the good is 
 social as well as individual, it is interesting to 
 
 * Witness the divinity, crucifixion, ministry, and immacu- 
 late conception. 
 
GOOD AND EVIL. 229 
 
 reflect in how many ways the social classes 
 today that live in the law are recognizing and 
 confessing their actual participation in the 
 deeds of such as offend and how the offenders 
 are even making claims to righteousness. 
 Why, saviour and malefactor are as dependent 
 today, as much involved in each other or as 
 necessarily associated, as at the hour of the 
 Crucifixion. What malefactor has not saved 
 his fellows by taking their sins upon himself! 
 And what wonder that the life, the social func- 
 tion of the malefactor became idealized! 
 
 Yes, to the malefactor, the transgressor^ 
 there belongs a function in the life of society, 
 which is commensurate only with that of the 
 leader or reformer, and the truth is that no 
 fact needs to be appreciated more fully than 
 this by the philosopher who would understand 
 history. Surely real leaders are transgressors 
 always. The very authority or sovereignty of 
 a king lies in the principle that he **can do no 
 wrong;" and, just as a king has to be exempt 
 in this way, so a pope has to be infallible, a 
 political leader irresponsible and arbitrary, and 
 even a god licentious or miracle-working. 
 Some centuries ago the notorious House of 
 Stuart saved puritan England; and in all ages 
 
230 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 lawless gods have made their sinful worship^ 
 pers lawful. 
 
 Now whenever extremes are made to meet, 
 as we are here making the transgressor and the 
 reformer meet, it seems at first as if life were 
 losing its very foundations. Who has not had 
 a sense of unreality upon learning that at best 
 cold and hot differed only in degree.? In the 
 end, however, the meeting of extremes is found 
 to establish instead of overthrow. Thus, to be 
 able to see leadership or reform even in trans- 
 gression is to make the life of mankind any- 
 thing but hopeless, even in its worst conditions. 
 The reformer appears as one who does but 
 apply ideally or reflectively the natural func- 
 tion of the transgressor; he sanctifies the break- 
 ing of the law. Hence his sympathy and 
 charity for his offending contemporaries. And 
 the transgressor only unwittingly, that is, 
 naturally rather than morally or spiritually 
 serves his fellows. What the transgressor 
 does in fact the reformer does also in act. 
 The transgressor unintentionally makes public 
 the private life of his fellows, his crime being 
 their vice; his thieving, to recall some exam- 
 ples already given, being an exposure or even 
 a parody of their ' ' honesty, ' ' or his adultery, 
 
GOOD AND EVIL. 231 
 
 of their lawful marriage, or his profanity, of 
 their cant, or his murder, of their capital pun- 
 ishment; and so doing he reveals them to 
 themselves and even by his punishment effects 
 their self-condemnation. And what is this 
 but unconscious leadership or unconscious re- 
 form? The reformer is only the idealized 
 transgressor; the transgressor, as it were, made 
 useful or brought under control. 
 
 And no conclusion from this relation of the 
 transgressor to the reformer can be more sig- 
 nificant than that which has really been in our 
 minds all along. Neither the good nor the 
 evil is a determined thing. Neither is the 
 endowment, the original virtue or the original 
 sin, of any person or class, of any act or any 
 way of living. This is repetition, but I say 
 again that in the case of the different acts of 
 an individual or in the case of the lives of the 
 different members or classes of society all are 
 good and bad together. To separate the good 
 and the evil is to justify the latter and condemn 
 the former. Can a man divide his own life.'* 
 The life of society is it not organic.-* 
 
 That the appearance of the transgressor as 
 well as the appearance of his natural contem- 
 porary the reformer is an incident of the alien- 
 
232 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 ation of society from itself all but goes without 
 saying. Both transgression and reform are 
 alienation. To this relationship, however, 
 attention will be called in a later chapter. 
 
 But here we have to consider a fact that in 
 its first statement may seem quite unintelligible 
 and yet that does but afford an illustration of 
 what has been said above. Thus, the conflict 
 of good and evil is identical with that of the 
 organic and the mechanical, or politically of 
 democracy and monarchy; for the monarch, as 
 already suggested, is both a leader and a trans- 
 gressor. Indeed leadership with its inseparable 
 incidents of transgression and liberation must 
 be recognized as very much more than the life 
 and authority of any single individual. It be- 
 longs to every member of the organic whole. 
 **Any single individual" is every individual, 
 or, exactly as democracy would have it, all 
 individuals are monarchs. Democracy is only 
 a universalized, a fulfilled monarchy. In it 
 the monarch's, the leader's, the transgressor's 
 function is everybody's. It would give to every 
 individual person something peculiar to do, 
 something upon which others must not en- 
 croach, something which is his right but their 
 wrong; and this, because individuality, identi- 
 
GOOD AND EVIL. 233 
 
 cal with leadership, depends on the assumption 
 of some special activity in an organic life. Or, 
 again, a truly democratic society cannot but be 
 an organism, and the life of an organism in- 
 volves what in the industrial world is known as 
 division of labor, but division of labor means 
 that in some one line, in some one relation to 
 the whole, each laborer, each person, is monarch- 
 ically and imperially supreme, being capable 
 of doing no wrong therein and so redeeming 
 his fellows for their own peculiar activities from 
 the sinfulness of his. 
 
 So, finally and in summary, are the evil and 
 the good not two but one; being two, only 
 because society comes into conflict with itself, 
 but one, because, in an organic society the 
 separate parts or the separated activities are 
 necessarily functions of each other, mutually 
 dependent and inclusive, each being invisibly 
 what the other is visibly.* 
 
 * Perhaps in a note one may allow himself to indulge in 
 fancies. The imagery, moreover, accompanying thought pro- 
 cesses is of peculiar interest, at least to psychologists, at the 
 present time. Persistent, then, throughout these pages, and 
 particularly vivid whenever I have come to recognize the or- 
 ganic relation of the implicit to the explicit or of the invisi- 
 ble to the visible, has been the image or the idea of the 
 relation of light and darkness, day and night, in th earth's 
 motion with reference to the sun. The good and evil, for ex- 
 ample, seem to be one exactly as day and night are one. Of 
 course for a monistic philosophy an analogy between the spir- 
 itual and the physical should be discoverable, and psychologi- 
 cally imagery is aiways more than mere imagery. 
 
CHAPTER XV. 
 
 REVOLUTION. 
 
 P\EVOLUTION, so intimately associated 
 *^ with the conflict of rehgion and reason, 
 or again with the conflict of good and evil, is 
 the natural outcome of alienation. It is a 
 forerunner of restoration. It is manifested evo- 
 lution. It is a return to nature; the natural 
 active in the human; the human lost in the 
 natural and become a mere tool. It is at once 
 man's restoration or redemption and the 
 change or even the destruction of his political 
 and geographical devices. In short, it is man 
 entering into a new humanity. 
 
 Historians are disposed to look to France for 
 evidence of the nature of revolution. France 
 seems like the laboratory of a people that is 
 over-fond of sensational experiments, of explo- 
 sions and other startling changes. But what is 
 to be seen in France underlies all life or all 
 history. For example, politically, England 
 and France are often contrasted as if they 
 were such extremes as cold and heat, but as 
 
REVOLUTION. 235 
 
 cold and heat are manifestations of one law to 
 the scientist, so England and France can show 
 only one process to the historian. 
 
 In general, then, the most obvious cause of 
 revolution, if any one cause can be selected, is 
 the formalism that comes with a society's 
 alienation from itself. Formalism involves 
 mechanicalism and mechanicalism always puts 
 into the hands of society a tool, as if a club, 
 with which to knock over the existing institu- 
 tions. Witness the struggle, which it brings, 
 between dogmatic unspiritual theism and athe- 
 ism, or between purely conventional morality 
 and sensualism, or between unpatriotic or only 
 outwardly patriotic Bourbonism and anarchy. 
 
 Too much has been said already to leave the 
 meaning here very much in doubt. Long ago 
 we saw how the penitent outgrows the confes- 
 sional and becomes ever more personally con- 
 scientious, and again how religion, turning 
 dogmatic, gives rise to science, and how mon- 
 archy develops democracy; and in each of these 
 cases is evidence of revolution; in each the 
 past becomes a tool for the overthrow of the 
 present; in each conventionalism or formalism 
 appears as only the other side of lawlessness. 
 
 Conventionalism, or formalism, is tradition- 
 
236 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTOPY. 
 
 alism, the worship of the letter of the past, 
 and the conflict of a revolution is just that of 
 traditionalism, which idolatrously separates 
 the past from the present, and idealism, which 
 concerns itself with an wholly abstract future. 
 But when traditionalism and idealism cross 
 swords, it is as if each had found only a con- 
 demning exposure of itself in the other and in 
 the outcome it may even be that the opponents 
 change places. Traditionalism by the very 
 abstraction that it makes, by its indifference to 
 the present, sanctions change; so to speak, it 
 lets nature take its course; and nature taking 
 its course is the process, exactly, with which 
 an abstract or irresponsible idealism identifies 
 itself. Nothing is quite so significant to an 
 understanding of revolution as the way in 
 which even so violent a change as death, the 
 death of sacrifice or the death of execution, is 
 never without sanction from either side. 
 Abstraction of either past or future makes 
 death to the present something that is even to 
 be courted instead of feared. The traditional- 
 ist already is in another world, while the 
 idealist has not yet entered this. 
 
 Do I seem to make it a matter of indifference 
 on which side in a revolutionary conflict one 
 
REVOLUTION. lyj 
 
 happens to be? By making the opponents so 
 in agreement with each other, nay, so inclu- 
 sive of each other, by showing them to be co- 
 operative even in their opposition, do I seem 
 to take all the meaning out of the conflict 
 itself? If so, I have not been understood. 
 Does the physicist give up his faith in resist- 
 ance, in impenetrability, in force, or in motion, 
 because he finds that action is equal to reac- 
 tion? On the contrary the equation comes as 
 a justification of his scientific faith, and in like 
 manner co-operation in conflict makes conflict 
 more real, not less real. When in history has 
 there been a struggle in which justice was not 
 as much on one side as on the other? The 
 historian is constantly recognizing this. For- 
 giving enemies, however, by finding them 
 justified, never makes the battles less signifi- 
 cant, or less glorious. It only gives to all 
 involved a share in the results, just as all had 
 had a share in the inducing conditions. Con- 
 flict does indeed depend on differences, but the 
 differences do not exclude each other. When 
 battle is on, an organic life has come into open 
 conflict with itself, and all are at once friends 
 and enemies to each other and to themselves. 
 No, I am very certainly not making conflict 
 
238 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 meaningless; I am making it real; I am making 
 it consistent with a substantial progress. 
 
 But, lastly, does the conflict of revolution 
 involve a resort to militarism ? To me, con- 
 fessedly, this is a relatively unimportant ques- 
 tion, although others, out of regard to present 
 day controversies, to present day aspirations, 
 will think differently. There are many who 
 have become fond of dreaming of "peaceful 
 revolutions, ' ' who like, perhaps, to talk of an 
 ** industrial ' ' as distinct from a military revo- 
 lution, or find comfort in the cry * * Evolution, 
 not revolution;*' but surely no thinker, or let 
 me say no real worker can deny or even wish 
 to deny conflict to the future. A * ' peaceful 
 revolution ' ' is not possible, and a future with- 
 out revolution might as well be past. But it 
 is possible, indeed it even seems probable, that 
 militarism is passing away. Disarmament is 
 no longer unthinkable, for our times are mani- 
 festing the development of noteworthy checks 
 to the resort to arms. To enumerate these is 
 hardly necessary, but here they are in part. 
 Internationalism, democracy, industrialism are 
 checks that are growing in effectiveness. War, 
 too, is becoming too dangerous, and no one 
 can doubt that the more terrible its instruments 
 
REVOLUTIOlsr, 239 
 
 are, the less likely is their use. Then the 
 changing views of property and the absence of 
 undiscovered and unclaimed territory are other 
 checks to warfare. So such as dream of evo- 
 lution without revolution or of peaceful revo- 
 lution may be concerned with a half-truth, but, 
 whatever is in store for the military way of 
 expressing force through human nature, there 
 can be no doubt that there is conflict ahead; 
 hard, earnest, revolutionary conflict; progres- 
 sive conflict; conflict that can not fail to de- 
 stroy because it will be bent on fulfilling. 
 
CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 THE GREAT MAN. 
 
 TTS this book draws to a close, it almost seems 
 '* as if an explanation, I might even say a 
 justification of the great man had been the 
 motive from the beginning. Such influential 
 writers as Herbert Spencer on the one hand and 
 W. H. Mallock on the other seem to me to 
 have either unduly belittled or fatally exalted 
 the great man's relation to society and social 
 growth, and in consequence I must regard it a 
 peculiarly interesting and valuable service to 
 history and political science to show what the 
 relation really is. Possibly and I am by no 
 means insensible to this possibility my own 
 view may be found inadequate, but even ambi- 
 tious thinkers have to take risks. Success is 
 only for those who dare to fail. 
 
 So, to face at once the danger of failure, the 
 great man is an individual; he is pre-eminently 
 an individual; and his individuality must surely 
 be true to the conditions of individuality in 
 general. Thus, he must really share in the 
 
THE GREAT MAN. 241 
 
 causation of the social life. His consciousness 
 and his activity must be also the social con- 
 sciousness and the social activity. He must be 
 an application of force, peculiarly of social 
 force, or as the same thing the liberation and 
 individuation, the focusing of an activity actual 
 in the social life. Furthermore, he must have 
 for his motive exactly that upon which his ex- 
 istence depends, namely, a relation, an organic 
 relation to the life that encompasses him. 
 Repetition, then, or imitation can not at any 
 moment, be his interest, nor on the other hand, 
 whether in his consciouness or in his activity, 
 can mere eccentricity, mere isolation, have ideal 
 value for him. As just said, he naturally seeks 
 an organic relation; he seeks the expression of 
 just what he is; so that both unity and differ- 
 ence, both imitation and invention are control- 
 ling interests in whatever he does. And these 
 are not two interests of course, but one and in- 
 separable, since in life that is organic unity and 
 differences are intrinsic to each other. 
 
 In earlier pages we came to the conclusion 
 that for evolution or for history consciousness 
 and life, or thought and action, whether in the 
 single individual or in society, are not merely 
 coextensive but also essential to each other, 
 
^42 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 each being at once a condition and a result of 
 the other, and we concluded also, with special 
 regard to the incidents of social development, 
 that conscious activity induces alienation. A 
 people, in other words, in so far as active and 
 conscious, is always in some measure beside 
 itself, living another life than what appears at 
 least to casual observation to be its actual life. 
 There can be no conscious activity, no organic 
 social life, if a motive to otherness, a principle 
 of differentiation, is not present. Moreover 
 this motive or principle, is no mere abstract 
 sentiment. It is no. shadowy unreality. It is 
 no purely formal principle of logic. On the 
 contrary, from the beginning, it is an activity 
 as well as a sentiment, a concrete condition as 
 well as an idea. It is an activejsocial force which 
 is as necessary to the life of society as the more 
 conservative interest in self-preservation, since 
 it brings, not mere preservation, but realization, 
 fulfilment, evolution. 
 
 And what have individuality and greatness to 
 do with it ? IndividuaHty and greatness are 
 dependent upon it or may even be identified 
 with it. Thus, in the first place, individuality 
 and greatness are different, perhaps, but as 
 already implied they are not different in kind; 
 
THE GREAT MAN. 243 
 
 and, in the second place, the individuality that 
 is great belongs always to the time in a society's 
 life when alienation is extreme. By a principle, 
 too, which is not less psychological and socio- 
 logical than logical, greatness tends to stand 
 alone, to inhere in a single individual. The 
 greatest man is the sole representative of the 
 otherness, of the other life, that his fellows in 
 the way of being beside themselves have come 
 to lead. Do you ask why } Would you know 
 the principle.? Singleness, then, is necessary 
 to free expression, to clear and complete reve- 
 lation, to conviction. It shows, and only it can 
 show the alienation to be at its limit. Is the 
 alienation partial and only in process } Then 
 there is a number of great men. Is it, on the 
 other hand, complete } There is but one great 
 man, a solitary but a convincing and a con- 
 victing witness. 
 
 But the othernesss that makes greatness like 
 the otherness that makes individuality must be 
 at one as well as at variance with the environ- 
 ment; the individual, and particularly the great 
 individual, must somehow belong to his times 
 even while he seems aloof; else, to say the 
 least, a philosophy of history can have nothing 
 to do with him and his greatness. How, then, 
 
244 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 can these two conditions be realized ? To say 
 that all organic life involves them is to speak 
 truly enough and it is to say all that is neces- 
 sary so far as the mere principle goes, but it is 
 too much of a formula here to be altogether 
 satisfactory. And hardly more satisfactory is 
 the statement that at a time when society is 
 thoroughly alienated from itself the alien char- 
 acter of the great man must, as a matter of 
 course, be expressive of a perfectly genuine 
 adaptation. This, too, is true and sufficient in 
 itself, but we can be still more direct and still 
 more definite. Summarily, then, the relation 
 of the great man to his contemporaries is that 
 of end to means, or of future to past. 
 
 This calls for explanation, but the explana- 
 tion is at hand. As has been shown here, the 
 process of alienation involves the development 
 of formalism or let us say of a conservatism 
 that is formal in exact proportion as it is con- 
 servative or merely traditional, and such a 
 development shows the life of a people, or 
 more strictly speaking, the institutions of all 
 sorts with which the life has been identified, 
 losing their ideal or intrinsic value and becom- 
 ing the mere material instrument of a new life. 
 Thus, to give an example already familiar to 
 
THE GREAT MAN. 245 
 
 US, patriotism and political unity or continuity 
 pass into cosmopolitanism and political disinte- 
 gration, the people becoming utilitarian even 
 in the regard of their state and its forms and 
 institutes. A formal allegiance persists of 
 course; it persists, until it is purely empty 
 or formal, until alienation is complete; with 
 completion it avows its treachery, throwing off 
 the disguise. With completion, however, the 
 great man also appears, being only the visible 
 symbol or exponent, the active agent of the 
 end to which the traditional life is the already 
 adapted or developed means. So came Socra- 
 tes to the Greeks, and Christ to the Jews. 
 
 Traditionalism is in effect treating the means 
 to life, as if it were the end. It is then, acting 
 in. or for the future but looking at the past. In 
 short, a sort of advancing backward or a dis- 
 guised radicalism. Psychologically and this 
 is a most important fact it prepares a peo- 
 ple for some particular function or service in 
 the larger life into which they are entering; 
 for a function or service that they finally recog- 
 nize and appropriate with the life of the great 
 man among them. Witness the development 
 of the Greeks, after the time of Socrates, into 
 imperial soldiers, and of the Jews, after the 
 
246 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 time of Christ, into money-lenders and bankers. 
 Alienation turned Greek traditionalism into 
 militarism, and Hebrew traditionalism into 
 banking. * 
 
 Besides putting the past into use, or say be- 
 sides developing formalism and eventually mak- 
 ing it instrumental, greatness realizes or antic- 
 ipates the future. The great man is progress 
 incarnate. He contemporizes the past and the 
 future with the present. Being the fully defined, 
 the revealed and the individuated life of his 
 people, he both realizes their past and expres- 
 ses their future in his own career. They be- 
 come his followers, doing socially what he has 
 done individually. The very nature of his birth 
 insures the repetition of his career in the life 
 that includes him, his revealed achievement 
 necessarily becoming its motive. 
 
 And the great man as progress incarnate, as 
 one in whom both the past is fulfilled and the 
 future is anticipated, is a witness to will and 
 motive and individual responsibility in history, 
 in social evolution. Thus, to keep the supreme 
 illustrations, Socrates showed the Greek vic- 
 
 *In Citizenship and Salvation^ already referred to, I have 
 developed the idea of the last two or three paragraphs and of 
 several that follow, at considerable length. Hence my brevity 
 at this time. 
 
THE GREAT MAN. 247 
 
 torious over himself before the final conquest 
 by Rome, and Christ * * took captivity captive. ' ' 
 With such anticipations of history to testify 
 against it determinism can get no hold upon 
 the mind of the historian, and in general indi- 
 viduality is made synonymous with a genuine 
 freedom or with a truly moral responsibility. 
 
 So we see the great man. He is the spirit 
 of his people liberated and embodied, as they 
 are separated from themselves; the master of 
 their past; the prophet of their future; a ver- 
 itable mediator, in whom alienation and resto- 
 ration meet and are identified; in fine, the in- 
 dividual always pre-eminent and supreme. 
 
 But at least two things more ought to be 
 said, and the first of these is that greatness 
 or genius is not talent. Genius and talent 
 are indeed dependent upon each other ' * psy- 
 chologically and sociologically ; ' ' but, as even 
 common opinion has always recognized, they 
 are quite distinct. Thus, the Sophists and the 
 Jews had talent, but Socrates and Christ had 
 genius. Talent is conservative, traditional, 
 lawful; genius is free. Talent is time-serving, 
 genius, independent. Talent uses; genius in- 
 vents. Talent formulates; genius discovers and 
 
248 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTOR V. 
 
 reveals. Talent worships and follows; genius 
 leads. Talent alienates ; genius restores. 
 
 And, secondly and lastly, the greatest genius 
 is a religious leader. This does but follow from 
 all that has been said. Nay, it is a virtual rep- 
 etition, for above we saw how logical, or how 
 true to history Rome's identification of religion 
 and leadership became. The monarch was also 
 the God, the Incarnate Spirit of another world; 
 and his subjects, at once soldiers and disciples. 
 Jurisprudence and art and science and philoso- 
 phy, the stages in order of the thought that 
 accompanies a society's alienation from itself, 
 have their great men, but also their great men 
 are never without company. The number in 
 the group of the great may diminish as the 
 stages succeed each other and with the dimi- 
 nution the greatness may increase, but the num- 
 ber is never one and the greatness is never 
 supreme till the alienation, which brings con- 
 viction of another world, is at its limit. When, 
 however, the number is one, the divine is man- 
 ifest in the human, the other world is brought 
 into this. 
 
CONCLUSION. 
 
 TO summarize the foregoing pages, in order 
 to draw their moral, is all that remains 
 for us to do. 
 
 Here, then, is the summary, unnecessary, 
 perhaps, but not altogether without use. His- 
 tory is the liberation of human society, as an 
 organism organically related to nature, in its 
 own realized law. Realization of the law is 
 through the development of individuals, nations 
 and persons, with all the incidents of alienation 
 and restoration, of evil and good, of science 
 and religion, of talent and genius, that have 
 been found to be involved. And the individ- 
 uals developed are agents of a genuine progress, 
 since the very essence of individuality is at 
 once adaptation or fulffllment of the past and 
 realization of the future. 
 
 And, as for the moral to be drawn, I can 
 content myself with just a word or two. His- 
 tory is no mere logical scheme. It is no body 
 of knowledge to be learned and recited. It is 
 no entertaining story to be read and then for- 
 
250 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 
 
 gotten or, if perhaps remembered, retained as 
 but the tool of some teacher's trade or the or- 
 nament of some gentleman's culture. And, 
 finally, it is no fatal process external to human 
 passion and human will. But what is it then.!* 
 History is the experience, the very life itself, 
 which we call our own. To adopt the familiar 
 formula of the sages of the East: The history 
 of human society that art thou! Its past } 
 No. Its future } No. What } Its living, all- 
 including present. 
 
INDEX. 
 
NDEX. 
 
 NoTK. The following index is intended to be rather topical than 
 verbal, so that in many cases the literal words will not be found on 
 the pages referred to. 
 
 Alexander, 162, 165. 
 Alienation, 76, 125, 126, 134, 
 142, 143 sq., 155, 201, 204, 
 
 215, 
 America, 37, 44, 51, 73, 122, 
 
 127, 141, 200. 
 Antiquarism, 150. 
 Approval, 225 sq. 
 Architecture, 199, 217, 
 Art, 155, 157 sq., 200,219. 
 Artisans, 155, 161. 
 
 Bank, 190, 193, 246. 
 Barbarian, 122, 198, 227. 
 Berkeley, 62. 
 Bruno, 187. 
 
 Calculus, 187. 
 Capital, 140, 142. 
 Cartesians, 187. 
 Catholicism, 174, 180, 198. 
 Causation, 37 sq., 46, 53 n., 
 
 55- 
 Chance, 25, 42, 217. 
 Change, 50, 53. 
 China, 125. 
 
 Christ, 79, 228, 245, 247. 
 Christendom, 79, 172, 184, 
 
 202. 
 Christianity, 51, 79, 127, 141, 
 
 I55 175. 192, 207. 
 Christian Science, 227. 
 
 Church, 25, 173, 198. 
 Citizenship and Salvation, 159, 
 
 192, 246. 
 City, 145, 147, 167, 212. 
 Coexistence, 29, 32, 46, 84, 
 
 129. 
 Coin, 135, 142, 191, 193. 
 Columbus, 37, 44, 51, 73. 
 Communication, 149, 189. 
 Condemnation, 225 sq. 
 Conflict, 56, 88 sq., 123, 216, 
 
 238. 
 Conquest, 165. 
 Consciousness, 31, 6t, 65, 72, 
 
 80, 87. 
 Consciousness, social, 109. 
 Contemporaneity, 15, 34, 40, 
 
 44 53. 56, 85, 93, 128, 151, 
 
 I79f 246. 
 Control, 86 sq., 146, 151, 2H. 
 Cosmopolitanism, 126, 154, 
 
 161, 213, 245. 
 Country, 145, 147, 212. 
 Creation, 33, 38, 55. 
 Credit, 138, 142, 194 sq. 
 Crime, 118. 
 
 Deduction, 183. 
 Democracy, 138, 141, 142, 
 
 171, 232. 
 Descartes, 184. 
 Determinism, 73. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Dewey, 86 n. 
 Differentiation, 47, 6g, 99, 
 
 144, 169. 
 Discovery of America, 200. 
 Division of labor, 145. 
 Dogmatism, 193, 218. 
 Domain or territory, 121, 135, 
 
 142, 239. 
 Dynamic Idealism, 25, 36, 48, 
 
 147. 
 
 Earth, 37, 52. 
 Eastern Question, 206 sq. 
 Endowment - theory, 32, 60, 
 
 100, III. 
 England, 234. 
 Environment, 29, 33 sq,, 54, 
 
 74, 85, 89, 113. 
 Epiphenomenality, 31, 62, 63. 
 Equity, 142, 197. 
 Eternal, 27. 
 Europe, 51, 141, 176. 
 Events, 24, 26. 
 Evil, 222 sq. 
 Evolution,'3osq., 77, 82, 203, 
 
 217. 
 Exchange, 173, 189, 190. 
 
 Factory, 190, 193. 
 Fatalism, 155, 162. 
 Feudalism, 182. 
 Fiatism, 193. 
 
 Formalism, 125, 235, 244. 
 France, 234. 
 Function, Organic, 67. 
 Future, 33, 35, 40, 128. 
 
 Galileo, 187. 
 
 Genius, 85, 227, 240 sq., 247. 
 
 Gentile, 122. 
 
 Good, 222 sq. 
 
 Government, 134, 142. 
 
 Gravity, 100, loi. 
 
 Great Man, The, 78, 240 sq. 
 
 Greek, 122, 125,127, 133,141, 
 
 I55> 165, 202, 227. 
 Groot, Hugo de, 176. 
 Group, 97 sq. 
 
 Group, human, or society, 103 
 sq. 
 
 Heat, 38, 50, 72. 
 Hegel, 16. 
 Heraclitus, 201. 
 Heresy, 193. 
 
 History, 11 sq., 43, 56, 77, 
 92, 97, 130, 211, 222, 249. 
 History of Philosophy, 16. 
 Hobbes, 116. 
 
 Idealism, 198, 236. 
 
 Imitation, 241. 
 
 Imperialism, 162, 171, 175, 
 
 181. 
 Immortality, 76. 
 Individualism, 103, 116, 188. 
 Individuality, 40, 59 sq., 65, 
 
 82, 89, 132 sq., 142. 
 Individuation, 68, 78, 120, 
 
 143, 240, 241. 
 Induction, 183. 
 Industrialism, 139, 142, 171, 
 
 182, 189, 193, 238. 
 Infinitesimal, 186, 189. 
 Inheritance, 136, 142, 196. 
 Inorganic, 60, 84. 
 Internationalism, 171, 175, 
 
 176, 181. 
 Invasion, 198. 
 Invention, 241. 
 
 Jew, 122, 202, 227, 245, 247. 
 Judea, 199, 206. 
 
 Kant, 62, 185 n. 
 Kepler, 187. 
 King, 173. 
 
 Labor or laborer, 132, 142, 
 145, 151, 152, 173, 177, 
 190. 
 
 Latin, 173, 176. 
 
 Law, 45, 91, 135, 138, 142, 
 
 155. 157- 
 Law, International, 176, 197. 
 Lawfulness, 223 sq. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Lawlessness, 223 sq. 
 Leadership, i6g, 230, 232. 
 Leibnitz, 187, 188. 
 Leisure, 151 sq., 227. 
 Leisured class, 145, 151, 212. 
 Life and consciousness, 65, 
 
 82, 241. 
 Literature, 133, 136, 140,142. 
 Localization, 144. 
 
 Machinery, 142, 173. 
 Mallock, 240. 
 
 Man, The Great, 78, 240 sq. 
 Materialism, 58, 73. 
 Mathematics, 153, 185, 189. 
 Mechanic, 137, 142. 
 Mechanicalization, 178, 182, 
 
 188, 235. 
 Mediterannean, 51, 206. 
 Memory, 33, 203. 
 Metalism, 193. 
 Michigan, University of, 37, 
 
 38, 52. 
 Militarism, 142, 169,171, 189, 
 
 238. 
 Milton, 199. 
 Miracle, 25, 217. 
 Monarch, 25, 112, 133, 142, 
 
 171* 232. 
 Money, 135. 
 Motion, 49. 
 
 Nationalism, 173, 175,181. 
 Nativists, 61. 
 Naturalism, 155. 
 Naturalization of the super- 
 natural, 142, 197. 
 Nature, 54 sq,. 120. 
 Newton, 187. 
 
 Occident, 127, 207. 
 Officials, 151. 
 Opinion, Public, 114. 
 Organic function, 67. 
 Organism, 23, 35, 36, 47, 75, 
 84, 86 sq , 98 sq., 104, 189. 
 Orient, 127, 206. 
 
 Painting, 199. 
 Papacy, 112, 173. 
 Parthians, 150. 
 Past, 15, 33, 35, 40, 128. 
 Patriarchism, 133, 142. 
 Patriotism, 154, 245. 
 Pericles, 155. 
 
 Philosopher, 155, 162, 215. 
 Philosophy, History of, 16. 
 Pilgrimage, 199. 
 Politician, 155, 161. 
 Positivism, 217. 
 Present, 15, 40, 128. 
 Production, 173, 190. 
 Progress, 80 sq., 93, 200,201 
 
 sq., 246. 
 Property, 133, 135, 138, 191. 
 Protestantism, 174, 180, 198, 
 
 199. 
 Public Opinion, 114. 
 
 Rationalists, 61. 
 Realism, 150. 
 Reason, 211 sq. 
 Recapitulation, 34, 204. 
 Religion, 133, 136, 142, 155, 
 
 163, 211 sq., 248. 
 Repetition, 202 sq., 241. 
 Restoration, 126, 137, 142, 
 
 168 sq., 201, 204. 
 Revelation, 136, 142. 
 Revolution, 124, 154, 155, 
 
 162, 216, 234sq.; 238. 
 Rome, 127, 139, 141, I50> 
 
 155, 172. 
 Rousseau, 116. 
 
 Scholasticism, 183. 
 
 Schopenhauer, 62. 
 
 Science, 9, 31, 45, 155, 160 
 
 sq.. 217, 227. 
 Sensationalists, 61. 
 Sequence, 28, 32, 41, 46, 129. 
 Servants, 157, 
 Smith, Adam, 188. 
 Society, 97, 103. 
 Socrates, 155, 166, 245. 
 
IV 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Soldier, 134, 142, 173. I77- 
 Sophists, 247. 
 Sovereignty, 138, 142. 
 Space, 23, 75, 91. 
 Spartacus, 179. 
 Spencer, 103, 105, 112. 
 Spinoza, 42, 187, 195 n. 
 Spirit or the spiritual, 26, 57, 
 
 76, 134, 142. 
 Spiritualism, 58. 
 Stages of Social Evolution, 
 
 I2t), 128, 142. 
 State, 173. 
 
 Sun, as a cause, 37, 52, 
 Supernatural, 142, 165, 197. 
 
 Talent, 227, 247. 
 Thinkers or thought, 145, 
 
 151, 211 sq. 
 
 Time, 21 sq., 75, 85, 91, 203. 
 
 Transgressor or transgression, 
 
 118, 228, 232. 
 Transportation, 139, 189. 
 Travel, 48, 
 Territory or domain, 121, 135, 
 
 142, 239. 
 
 University of Michigan, 
 
 37. 38, 52. 
 Unknowable, 107. 
 
 War, 238. 
 
 Will, 136, 246. 
 
 Will, Social, 109, 115, 138. 
 
 Xerxes, 125. 
 
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