Such a marked difference in the estimate of the status of individuality is proof of difference in the empirical content of ancient and modern culture. In primitive cultures, experience is dominated by what a contemporary French school has called categories of participation and incorporation. Life and being belong in a significant sense to the tribe and family; particular creatures are only members of a consolidated whole. This state of social affairs formed the pattern in accord with which all natural events were construed. One need not endorse all the details of the theories of this French school or even accept its general principles, in order to recognize a predominantly collectivistic character in early culture, and to perceive its influence upon early beliefs and modes of thought. An individual was a member of a group- whole; in this membership were almost exhausted his accomplishments and possibilities. From birth, he was a subject for assimilation and incorporation of group traditions and customs; his personal measure was the extent in which he became their vehicle. Private belief NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT and invention, were a deviation, a dangerous eccentricity, signs of disloyal disposition. The private was an equiva¬ lent of the illicit; and all innovations and departures from custom are illicit: — witness the fact that children have to be educated and inducted into tradition and custom. This need of education, moreover, and of main¬ tenance of tradition against deviation serve to bring otherwise unconscious customs to mind, and to render consciousness of them acute and emotional.1 Thereby, customs are more than mere overt ways of action; tradi¬ tion is more than external imitation and reproduction of what obtains in outward behavior. Custom is Nomos, lord and king of all, of emotions, beliefs, opinions, thoughts as well as deeds.
Yet mind in an individualized mode has occasionally some constructive operation. Every invention, every improvement in art, technological, military and political, has its genesis in the observation and ingenuity of a particular innovator. All utensils, traps, tools, weapons, stories, prove that some one exercised at sometime ini¬ tiative in deviating from customary models and standards. Accident played its part; but some one had to observe and utilize the accidental change before a new tool and custom emerged. Men were not wholly and merely subdued to the demands of custom, even when innova¬ tions were looked upon as threats to the welfare of the group, defiances of its gods.
As Goldenweiser has said: “Whether it is a pot, basket or blanket that is being manufactured, or the soil 1 See Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man. Chapter VIII of this book seems to me to supply what is sound in the view of the French school alluded to, free from its exaggerations.
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE that is being tilled, or an animal that is being hunted or fought — in all of these situations man faces an individual, technical task. In all of these directions there is room for the development and exhibition of skill. In industry and the chase, in a sea-faring expedition and a war raid, things can be done well and less well. There is opportunity for comparison of individual efforts, there is rivalry.”2 As a fruit of this rivalry of individuals, pace-making occurs; those who excel set a standard for others to come up to; they furnish models of technique to be adopted by others, till gradually or suddenly they initiate a new custom. Even in cultures most committed to reproduction, there is always occurring some creative production, through specific variations, that is, through individuals. Thus, while negatively individuality means something to be subdued, positively it denotes the source of change in institutions and customs. While the negative side is most conscious and most asserted, the positive phase is there and is taken advantage of, even though by stealth and under cover. Upon the whole the imagination and effort of individual technicians and artists were submerged; in idea, the doctrine of fixed wholes with their fixed patterns prevailed. We may well follow the further statements of Dr. Goldenweiser. “When tradition is a matter of the spoken word, the advantage is all on the side of age. The elder is in the saddle;” because he is the most experienced man and the one who best embodies the net experience of the group. The group is small enough to be homogeneous; innova¬ tions are conspicuous and focus resentment; customary activities are moreover enmeshed in ceremonialism and have supernatural sanctions; variations when once they 2 Early Civilization, pp. 407-8.
NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT are adopted become automatic group habits; they endure not as ideas or because of insight into principles, but as “motor habits which represent nothing but knowledge and technical experience rendered mechanical through habituation;” individual “consciousness and ratiocination quickly are incorporated in objective results which are handed down while the thinking perishes; inventions become part of the technical equipment of behavior, not of thought and understanding.” Under such cir¬ cumstances, individual variations of thought remain private reveries or are soon translated into objective established institutions through gradual accumulation of imperceptible variations. The exceptional character of creative individuality is reflected in attribution of the origin of the arts, industrial and political, to gods and semi-divine heroes.
Thus the artist and artisan merely observe, as has been noted in another connection, ready-made models and patterns, and unquestioningly follow procedures ante¬ cedently established. Patterns and methods are ac¬ cepted as belonging to the objective nature of things; there is next to no sense of any connection between them and personal desire and thought; to introduce such a connection would evince a dangerously subversive spirit. The point of view therein displayed is so far from that which animates modern psychology and philosophy that it is not easily recoverable; yet we do not have even today to go far to find a like notion regulative of action and belief. The mechanic who follows blue¬ prints and a procedure dictated by his machine in the production of standardized commodities would, if he were both articulate and uncognizant of inventions by EXPERIENCE AND NATURE others, say the same thing. Legal formalities consciously adopt similar realistic conceptions in politics and morals, and find the exhibition of the spirit which they take for granted in science and industry to be anarchistic and destructive in less technical fields. Standards and pat¬ terns seem to them to be given in the nature of things; the intervention of initiative and invention, of individual¬ ity, are counted contrary to reason as well as to sincerity and loyalty.
When experience is of this sort, an individual worker or demiurge has only to observe and conform. He is but a case to be subsumed in a fixed whole as far as may be; what is left over is merely quantitative and accidental. Plato found in the arts exemplifications of fixed arche¬ types governing particular processes of change through imparting to them measure and proportion; hence changes as far as knowable were subject in advance to the dialectic of geometry. As in the Philebus, measure comes first; then comes the measured, the symmetrical and beautiful; conscious mind and wisdom are in the third rank as observation of measure and the measured antecedently established. In similar fashion, Aristotle could draw his account of the four fundamental affairs of nature from analysis of the procedure of artisan, with no suspicion that he was thereby subjecting his metaphysics to an anthropomorphic rendering of nature; setting up the cumulative deposit of individual variations of insight and skill as the measure of nature. It is inept to charge these thinkers with hypostatizing psychical states and processes. Since their own experience exhibited sub¬ ordination of individualized mind to objects, operations, patterns and ends that were preestablished and presented NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT ready-made and complete, their metaphysic and logic were in so far a faithful report of what they found. Greek philosophy converted not psychological condi¬ tions but positive institutional affairs into cosmic realities. The idea that generalization, purposes, etc., are individual mental processes did not originate until experience had registered such a change that the functions of individual¬ ized mind were productive of objective achievements and hence capable of external observation.
When this happened, an extraordinary revolution oc¬ curred. The conception of the individual changed com¬ pletely. No longer was the individual something com¬ plete, perfect, finished, an organized whole of parts united by the impress of a comprehensive form. What was prized as individuality was now something moving, changing, discrete, and above all initiating instead of final. As long as deviation of particulars from estab¬ lished order meant disorder, the metaphysics and logic of subordination of parts to the form of a pre-formed whole was reasonable. Mind as individualized could be recognized in other than a pejorative sense only when its variations were social, utilized in generating greater social security and fullness of life. This was possible only when social relationships were heterogeneous and expansive, when demand for initiative, invention and variation exceeded that for adherence and conformity. It is noteworthy that even Plato with all his zeal for a fixed organized whole could not imagine its coming into being save through the effort of some happily constituted and fortunately placed individual. Social heterogeneity alone does not promote a functioning of variations for socially desirable consequences, and thereby constitute EXPERIENCE AND NATURE individuality as something objective and socially acknowl¬ edged. It may signify only a break up of pious ad¬ herence to a cumulative and conserved outcome of prior history. But let there be a situation in which the tradi¬ tion of order and unity is still vital while the actual state of affairs is one of variation and conflict, and there is a situation in which dependence must perforce be placed on individuality. Even though its office be conceived at first as merely restorative, a return to an earlier and better state of affairs, as Italians thinkers would return to Greco-Roman culture and the early protestant to primitive Christianity, yet the operation of individuals rather than that of collective tradition is the hope and reliance. Under such circumstances, particularized cen¬ tres of initiation and energy are prized because being emancipated from the net work of current forces, they are free to direct change to new objective consequences.
Individualism in modern life has been understood in diverse ways. To those retaining the classic tradition, it is a revolt of undisciplined barbarians, reverting to the spontaneous petulant egotism of childhood; in another version of this underlying idea, it is rebellion of unre¬ generate human nature against divine authority, es¬ tablished among men for their salvation. To still others, it is emancipation, the achieving of voluntary maturity; courageous independence in throwing off all external yokes and bondages, in asserting that every human being is an end in himself; in effect a transfer to each conscious unit of honorific predicates previously reserved for the class, species, universal. In any case, an individual is no longer just a particular, a part without meaning save in an inclusive whole, but is a subject, self, a distinctive centre of desire, thinking and aspiration.
NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT An adherent of empirical denotative method can hardly accept either the view which regards subjective mind as an aberration or that which makes it an independent creative source. Empirically, it is an agency of novel reconstruction of a preexisting order. Criticism of the history of political theory during the formation of modern European states may bring out the difference between such a view and that of both classic universalism and extreme modern subjectivism. The older theory had asserted that the state exists by nature. The modern declared that it existed by means of agreements between individuals who willed the institution of civil order. We may imagine reformers of the seventeenth century saying that the states they found about them did indeed exist by nature — that was precisely what was the matter with them. Because they were natural products, they were products of force, chance, fraud, tyranny. Hence they were naturally the scene of war, foreign and domestic, of servitudes and inequities, of intrigue and harsh coercion — one huge historical accident. A just and good state would be one brought into existence by voluntary con¬ vention; by promises exchanged and obligations mutually undertaken. A good state exists not by nature but by the contriving activities of individual selves in behalf of the satisfaction of their needs. It implies art, not nature; a clear perception by individuals of what they want and of the conditions through which their wants can be satisfied. In detail, thinkers divided into opposite schools. Some held that by nature individuals are non¬ social, becoming social when subjected to discipline by artificial and instituted law to which they are naturally adverse. Others attributed to the natural individual EXPERIENCE AND NATURE some degree of friendly and genial inclination. Both schools agreed that just political order, legitimate authority and subordination, is a product of voluntary conjunction of individuals naturally exempt from the universal of civil law.
The truth of which the social compact was a symbol is that social institutions as they exist can be bettered only through the deliberate interventions of those who free their minds from the standards of the order which obtains. The underlying fact was the perception of the possibility of a change, a change for the better, in social organization. The fact that the intent of the percep¬ tion was veiled and distorted by the myth of an aboriginal single and one-for-all decisive meeting of wills is instruc¬ tive as an aberration, but the myth should not disguise the intent and consequence. Social conditions were altered so that there were both need and opportunity for inventive and planning activities, initiated by innovating thought, and carried to conclusion only as the initiating mind secured the sympathetic assent of other individuals.
I say individual minds, not just individuals with minds. The difference between the two ideas is radical. There is an easy way by which thinkers avoid the necessity of facing a genuine problem. It starts with a self, whether bodily or spiritual being immaterial for present purposes, and then endows or identifies that self with mind, a formal capacity of apprehension, devising and belief. On the basis of this assumption, any mind is open to entertain any thought or belief whatever. There is here no prob¬ lem involved of breaking loose from the weight of tradi¬ tion and custom, of initiating observations and reflections, forming designs and plans, undertaking experiments on NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT the basis of hypotheses, diverging from accepted doc¬ trines and traditions. Or when it is observed that this departure occurs infrequently and is not easy, some vague reference to genius and originality disposes of the ques¬ tion. But the whole history of science, art and morals proves that the mind that appears in individuals is not as such individual mind. The former is in itself a system of belief, recognitions, and ignorances, of acceptances and rejections, of expectancies and appraisals of meanings which have been instituted under the influence of custom and tradition.
It is not easy to break away from current and estab¬ lished classifications and interpretations of the world. The difficulty in this respect, however, is eased by the notion that after all it is only error that the mind needs to cut loose from, and that it can do this by direct appeal to nature, by applying pure observation and reflection to pure objects. This notion of course is fiction; objects of knowledge are not given to us defined, classified, and labeled, ready for labels and pigeon-holes. We bring to the simplest observation a complex apparatus of habits, of accepted meanings and techniques. Otherwise observation is the blankest of stares, and the natural ob¬ ject is a tale told by an idiot, full only of sound and fury. In the case of social objects and patterns, institutions and arrangements, we have not the benefit of the mitigat¬ ing fiction of direct correction by appeal of transparent mind to the court of nature. There is a contrast be¬ tween physical objects and objects as they are believed to be, even though what they are believed to be is an unescapable medium in observing what they are. Where is such a contrast to be found in the case of existing social EXPERIENCE AND NATURE institutions and standards? The contrast is not, as it seems to be in the case of knowledge of physical existence, between a belief which is defective or false and an exist¬ ence which is real; it is between an existence which is actual, and a belief, desire and aspiration for something which is better but non-existent.
Such facts exemplify the difference between a bodily or a psychic self with a mind and mind as individual. Either the better social object is sheer illusion, or else individual thought and desire denote a distinctive and unique mode of existence, an object held in solution, undergoing transformation, to emerge finally as an established and public object. Reference to imagination is pertinent. But the reference is too frequently used to disguise and avoid recognition of the essential fact and the problems involved in it. Imagination as mere reverie is one thing, a natural and additive event, complete in itself, a terminal object rich and consoling, or trivial and silly, as may be. Imagination which terminates in a modifi¬ cation of the objective order, in the institution of a new object is other than a merely added occurrence. It involves a dissolution of old objects and a forming of new ones in a medium which, since it is beyond the old object and not yet in a new one, can properly be termed subjective.
The point in placing emphasis upon the role of in¬ dividual desire and thought in social life has in part been indicated. It shows the genuinely intermediate position of subjective mind: it proves it to be a mode of natural existence in which objects undergo directed reconstitu¬ tion. Reference to the place of individual thought in political theory and practice has another value. Unless NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT subjective intents and thoughts are to terminate in picturesque utopias or dogmas irrelevant to constructive action, the)'- are subject to objective requirements and tests. Even in the crudest form of the contract theory, men had to do something. They had at least to meet together, come to agreement, give guarantees, and govern their subsequent conduct by agreements reached, or else suffer a tangible penalty. Thinking and desiring, no matter how subjective, are a preliminary, tentative and inchoate mode of action. They are “overt” behavior of a communicated and public form in process of construc¬ tion, and behavior involves change of objects which tests the meanings animating behavior.
There is a peculiar intrinsic privacy and incommunica¬ bility attending the preparatory intermediate stage. When an old essence or meaning is in process of dissolution and a new one has not taken shape even as a hypothetical scheme, the intervening existence is too fluid and formless for publication, even to one’s self. Its very existence is ceaseless transformation. Limits from which and to which are objective, generic, stateable; not so that which occurs between these limits. This process of flux and ineff ability is intrinsic to any thought which is subjective and private. It marks “consciousness” as bare event. It is absurd to call a recognition or a conception subjective or mental because it takes place through a physically or socially numerically distinct existence; by this logic a house disappears from the spatial and material world when it becomes my house; even a physical movement would then be subjective when referred to particles.
Recognition of an object, conception of a meaning may be mine rather than yours; yours rather than his, at a par- EXPERIENCE AND NATURE ticular moment; but this fact is about me or you, not about the object and essence perceived and conceived. Acknowledgment of this fact is compatible however with the conviction that after all there would be no objects to be perceived, no meanings to be conceived, if at some period of time uniquely individualized events had not intervened. There is a difference in kind between the thought which manipulates received objects and essences to derive new ones from their relations and implications, and the thought which generates a new method of observ¬ ing and classifying them. It is like the difference between readjusting the parts of a wagon to make it more efficient, and the invention of the steam locomotive. One is formal and additive; the other is qualitative and transfor¬ mative. He knows little who supposes that freedom of thought is ensured by relaxation of conventions, censor¬ ships and intolerant dogmas. The relaxation supplies opportunity. But while it is a necessary it is not a sufficient condition. Freedom of thought denotes free¬ dom of thinking; specific doubting, inquiring, suspense, creating and cultivating of tentative hypotheses, trials or experimentings that are unguaranteed and that involve risks of waste, loss, and error. Let us admit the case of the conservative; if we once start thinking no one can guarantee where we shall come out, except that many objects, ends and institutions are surely doomed. Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place.
In approaching the exaggerations of individual mind found in modern philosophy which go by the name of subjectivism and a large part of what is termed idealism, NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT we may profitably recur to ancient thought. The ques¬ tion of the relation of the objective and subjective did not present itself under that name. The problem of the rela¬ tion of the “natural” and the “positive” covered at least part of the same ground, and in a way closer to experience than does the course taken by much modern philosophy. The “positive” was a term used to cover everything of distinctively human institution, in languages, customs, manners, codes, laws, governments. The issue was whether nature was a norm for these arrangements or whether they were something to which nature should submit. The classic answer was in the former sense. But there were those who regarded nature as raw, crude, wild, and who thought of man and his doings as the stand¬ ard and measure of nature.
The former conception, under theological sanctions and interpretations, was adopted into the medieval concep¬ tion of natural law, and made absolutely controlling in morals and politics, wherever not supplemented by reve¬ lation, which after all was revelation of a highernature. To put the problem in terms of the connection between nature and institutions has an advantage over the isola¬ tion of the ego by modern philosophy. It acknowledged the social factor. Even when the origin of the positive was sought in the will, in the decrees and enactments of particular persons, the latter were thought of as possessing a socially representative office, as heroes, lawgivers, not as isolated individual minds.
The complete subordination of the positive to natural law in the medieval version of the classic theory involved modern thought in a peculiar embarrassment when inter¬ est in humanity as distinct from divinity revived. The EXPERIENCE AND NATURE institutions which men wished to modify, for which they wished to substitute others or to which they wished to add others of a secular sort, were bound up with divinity, with authoritative natural and revealed law. It was not possible to put institutions as such in contrast to nature, for by accepted theory existing institutions were in the main expressions of the law of nature. The resource which offered itself was to place the mind of the individual as such in contrast to both nature and institutions. This historic fact, reinforced with the conspicuous assertion of medievalism that the individual soul is the ulti¬ mate end and ultimate subject of salvation or damnation, affords, it seems to me, the background and source of the isolation of the ego, the thinking self, in all philosophy influenced by either the new science or Protestantism. Descartes as well as Berkeley uses “self” as an equivalent of “mind,” and does so spontaneously, as a matter of course, without attempt at argument and justification. If the given science of nature and given positive institu¬ tions expressed arbitrary prejudice, unintelligent custom and chance episodes, where could or should mind be found except in the independent and self-initiated activi¬ ties of individuals? Wholesale revolt against tradition led to the illusion of equally wholesale isolation of mind as something wholly individual. Revolting and reforming thinkers like Descartes little noted how much of tradition they repeated and perpetuated in their very protests and reforms.
An adequate recognition of the empirical historical causes of the exaggeration of the ego in modern philoso¬ phy, due to its isolation from social customs, and these from the physical world, makes, it seems to me, criticism NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT