Читать книгу The Making of a Man - James W. Lee - Страница 12

Table of Contents

All power whatever, that distinguishes man from the brute, that in any respect contributes to his commercial, mental, moral, or human value, is due to union, relation, action and interaction among individuals. In nature we may find illustrations of this truth. Sound, electricity, heat, and light, are forms of force which owe their existence to action, relation, interaction among material particles. They would never arise in a universe of unrelated elements. Their difference is due, not to the vibration of different elements, but to different rates of vibration among the same elements. Consequent upon certain terms of formal and quiet social intercourse among the molecules, there is sound. When they intermingle more actively and intimately, there is electricity. With a slight change in the method, but no decrease in the velocity with which they move, there is heat. When they go at the top of their speed, waltzing and swinging corners at an unthinkable rate, there is light. From varying relations and actions among material particles, we get the music which charms us, the means of communication which unite us, the power to do work which serves us, and the beauty which refines us. The unceasing play of these simple unseen elements made the fame of Beethoven, who threw their vibrations into symphonies; and of Morse, who utilized their speed to carry the news; and of Watt, who hitched their radiations to the flying train; and of Daguerre, who put their undulations to painting pictures. All forms of physical force may be traced to the union, relation, and vibration of material particles. The distance from atoms to men is well-nigh infinite, but the points of resemblance between the genesis of physical force and the genesis of social force are sufficiently striking to make it permissible to trace the analogy between them. By social force is understood all those forms of energy which men find themselves to possess by virtue of their relations to one another in organized social life.

Commerce insures the union, and brings about the relations that make this force possible. It furnishes the conditions without which it could not be.

A self-contained, self-included, insulated person does carry within the depths of his being the organs of the civilized man, but they are as completely out of sight and out of use as the harvests that sleep within the kernels of the mummy wheat. If it were possible for an individual to come to years of maturity, out of relations with his fellows, he would be more destitute than a brute. Such an one, growing up in the woods or on an island, with no associates but the squirrels and the birds, would not have the personal furnishments of the monkey or the fox.

We can understand, too, by considering what man owes to his relations, how widely and completely he is separated from the lower animals. A thousand blackbirds, living together in relation, are not different from a thousand blackbirds living apart and out of relation. A squirrel gains no element of squirrelhood by companionship, and loses no element of it in isolation. He may be taken from his nest as soon as he is born and never be permitted to see another squirrel, but he will be just as much of a squirrel, and know as well how to get the meat out of a nut, as if free in the forests with others of his kind. A mocking bird comes to the power of song as well in a cage, separated from other birds, as when fed and trained in the orchard by the mother-bird. The chords in his throat were set to music, and without teacher or praise, at a certain period of his growth, his song will ring through the house.

The difference between a man brought up in some lone woods, out of all relation with men, and one brought up in a civilized community, is infinite. The lower animals get all they ever get by birth. No new gifts or powers come to them through companionship. They go unerringly to a certain destined end, whether they move in flocks or herds, or alone as individuals. Men, on the other hand, find themselves by coming together. Their organs sleep till waked by relation. By birth they can get nothing but the germs, the mere naked elements of what they are to become. Birth would be no blessing, but a deepening curse, but for what comes to the child through relation. Birthright alone is not worth a mess of pottage. Men often congratulate themselves on what they are pleased to term their individual rights and personal freedom. While men do have individual rights and personal freedom, it is always to be remembered that these belong to them because of the relations woven around them by the institutions of social life. The civilized man differs more from the savage, than the savage differs from the highest animal. Yet the lowest savage is infinitely removed from the highest animal, but solely in the possession of the germs of the attainments and the accomplishments which may be provoked and maintained by relation. Society alone furnishes the soil in which these germs can grow. The savage, alone in the woods, might secure for himself a covering of skins, but the cloth in which the civilized man clothes himself is possible only in social relations.

With the commencement of human relations, the outlines of an absolutely new world come into view. Dim and vague at the outset, as the relations are simple and low. But as these increase in number, range, and degree, not only the outlines, but the far-reaching surface, the mountains, the rivers, the products, the sky, and the climate of a new world stand out clear, definite, and unmistakable. This new realm we name civilization. It is super-imposed upon the physical world, but is as distinct from it as thought from the molecules of the brain. Nature furnishes the basis, but social relations furnish the conditions of the human energy that has lifted itself into the mighty edifice we call civilization.

All genera and species and families and individuals are so many forms in which the radiant energy of the sun has deposited itself. Playing with its heat and its light upon soil, sea, and sky, the sun has built the myriad organic forms we see. So all objects, interests, and laws embraced within the range of civilization are the forms in which social force, arising through relations, has deposited itself. Human language itself is an embodiment of social force. The grammars of different languages actually advertise the social status and condition of the peoples who used them. In the Chinese language we have no distinction as to parts of speech, thus showing that the national consciousness was arrested at the stage of paternalism in government. The ancient Romans put enormous stress upon the will. They formulated the laws by which men are still regulated in civilized social life. A hint of this we get in the Latin language, by the small use made of the pronoun. Ideas, too, are expressions of translated social energy. Nothing seems to be more insulated than the human brain, by the aid of which the mind does its thinking. Out of sight and out of touch, within the dark depths of its own mysterious home, it would appear to be shut up to absolute solitude. Here, at least, we would expect to find individual, independent work. But not so. No individual brain can think, only as it uses the brains of others in the process. Homer’s Iliad is a poetic formulation of what all Greece felt. The elements of myth, thought, passion, which it contains, were all in the contemporary Greek mind. In committing this poem to memory, the Greeks were but storing up their own thoughts.

Hegel, in thinking out his remarkable system of philosophy, used the brains of all the men who had preceded him in the difficult work of solving the problems of existence. Darwin saw much in nature, because, through relation, he was able to look through the eyes of all naturalists.

All values, whether in soil, waterfalls, precious stones, or money, are forms of social force. Land in a great city sells for two thousand dollars a front foot, because millions of people, drawn by the powers of commerce, have come into fellowship upon it. Robinson Crusoe would have given all the money he had on the ship for a loaf of bread. The heaps of gold and silver in Wall Street are so valuable, because seventy millions of people are circulating around them.

Moral laws are social products. They are not empirical, but fundamental, eternal, and essential. They inhere in the constitution of man. But it is only through relation that man comes to the recognition of them, as binding for conduct. Light and heat have their laws, definite and unfailing, but if natural particles never vibrated at a rate sufficient to create these forces, the laws would not appear. They arise along with the forces, and the same conditions which give rise to the forces, give rise to the laws. So moral laws accompany a certain degree of attainment and culture, only possible through relation.

Religion itself, the highest and most sacred deposit of human life, is a product of social force. Whether we regard it as “modes of emotion,” as Lecky; or the “recognition of all our duties as divine commands,” as Kant; or as “awe in the presence of the mystery of an inscrutable power in the universe,” as Spencer; or as “the infinite nature of duty,” as Mill; or as “the immediate feeling of the dependence of man on God,” as Schleiermacher, it never arises outside the range of relation. Still, religion is something constitutional, inalienable, divine; but man would never be thrilled by its hopes, or soothed by its peace, did he not stand in vital relation to his fellows. The elements and raw material of religion are eternally present, but relation calls into exercise the susceptibilities and faculties which appropriate these elements and raw material, turning them into hymns, theologies, prayers, sacrifices, liturgies, and ceremonies.

Commerce, by bringing men together under the necessities of finding food, clothing, shelter, enables them to find their intellects and what they can know, their hearts and what they can love, and their wills and what they can do.

Thus we trace the genesis of social force, with the expressions which it makes of itself, in property, literature, law, art, and religion, to mutual human relations, for the establishment of which, among men, Commerce seems to have been ordained. If men could, without trading, have found the means of subsistence, as do the foxes and the lions; then no relations in the high sense of the term would have been established among them; and like the foxes and the lions, they would have remained on the earth without progress and without history.

The sun must be making tremendous drafts upon some unseen sources of power, to be able to make, throughout the solar realm, such ample expenditures of energy without bankruptcy.

The location of the vast depositories of power, upon which he draws so liberally, we are not to inquire here. We do know that the force which builds the forest, flushes the meadows with green, braids the vines into festoons, and peoples the plant-world, comes from the sun. Wherever the materials which keep the sun’s fires burning come from, they must pass up to that center before they are available for service on this globe. The stamp and superscription of the sun must be upon them before they can take the form of grass, or leaf, or bird on the earth. In this sense stand human relations between the force contained in the individual, unrelated life, and the force which takes form in the objects of civilization. The crude and inarticulate force in the individuals of the tribe, or the nomads who only touch for war or passion, must be refined through moral, political, and spiritual relations before it is ready to take the form of poem, anthem, temple, or Plato.