Society And its Purpose
Book 1 - Society
CHAPTER 14
Continuation
152. The constitutive law of human society, as we have called it, has its source in the active relationship between external and internal society; similarly the law perfecting society, and hence the principle of social administration, has its source in what we have called the passive relationship. According to us, this relationship consists in the aptitude exterior society has for receiving impressions from things outside itself and transmitting them to interior society, that is, to souls. It is clear, however, that even if external union amongst human beings were not deceptive, but actually responded to their internal union, we could affirm only the existence of a society, not of a good society. If a society is to be good, it must have a good end, and be good internally. As we know, external society is only a simple representation and effect of internal society; the whole substance of society is internal and lies within the human spirit. This is true not only for the moral goodness of society, but for every perfection, even eudaimonological, which it may have.
153. There is never anything external for good or bad human beings. It is wrong to think the contrary. Everything good for human beings must be felt as good for them. It must fall within their feeling, which is never external but always totally internal. We must not mislead ourselves here: external things can indeed cause pleasing sensations, but only pleasant feelings themselves (we take `pleasant’ in its widest extension) are finally the good that we draw from external things. All actual, human good without exception is, properly speaking, internal. Outside such good, causes of good exist, but not good itself. These true, occasional causes of good, which are outside human beings, pertain to what we have called `external society’. We have to say, therefore, that external society must be directed at every turn to the amelioration and perfection of internal society, within which lies the proper end and, as we said, the life, spirit and form of societies.
154. The suitability of external society for influencing the amelioration and perfection of internal society is precisely what we have called the passive relationship between the two societies; as we said, it forms the law perfecting society and the principle according to which it should be administered. The same thing can be observed in individuals even before we see it in societies. The passive relationship between what is external and internal in the human being constitutes the means which develops and perfects what is internal. The spirit’s faculties develop by means of the perception of objects provided as material for internal, spiritual operations by the organs of the exterior senses.
In the same way, as the signs of external things transmitted to the spirit become the occasion for perfecting the spirit, so external things can also become the occasion for the spirit’s deterioration. This occurs in the individual and in society, and underpins the need for a guide who will direct to a good end the communication between exterior and interior. In society, this constitutes the office of administrator.
155. External society wisely administered and conducted perfects internal society by communicating to it three kinds of good: 1. it assists internal society (a society of souls) in learning how to make use of its own forces and powers; 2. it provides internal society with objects that help it to pursue its perfection; 3. finally, it provides internal society with objects (persons) through whom each member of the internal society somehow expands his existence. The first two services rendered by external to internal society dispose or help to perfection the individual members who already form a society; the objects that the society of bodies offers to the society of spirits bring about the aggregation and special perfection of internal society.
156. In this way, external society provides the principle, the means and the end of internal perfection. The principle are spirits, whose faculties are developed by external society; the means are real objects, many of which are furnished by external society as steps which elevate the spirit; the end are persons, the society itself, which through external relationships is constantly extended and enriched as new ties arise capable of bonding intelligences and hearts.
157. We must now briefly consider external society under its three relationships with internal society. We shall see: 1. how it develops human faculties; 2. how it helps to remedy moral weakness in human beings; finally, 3. how it extends the nature of human beings by binding them to one another with close, internal ties.
158. External society develops the intellectual, spiritual and bodily operations of human beings who are indefinitely perfectible in all these parts of human nature. However, because corporeal actions depend upon affections, and affections upon opinions held by the intellect (by the practical reason), we shall limit ourselves to considering the impetus received by the intellect from external society, the principle of all other human movement.
159. Experience shows that we receive all our faculties enclosed, as it were, in a seed where they can do nothing of themselves, even the tiniest act, until they are awakened by objects different from ourselves which stimulate the organs of sensation and our other animal powers. An immense difference exists, therefore, between the state of an already developed person, who has attained dominion over his own operations, and that of the same person in those first moments when he possessed his powers but, having no dominion over them, was unable to use them. We have to note carefully this distinction between powers and the ability to use them. Our powers, at least our principal powers, are innate, but the ability to use them is acquired through use under the influence of external stimuli. Thus, the ability to use our own powers is acquired a little at a time in accordance with the use we make of them.
160. For example, however we wish to use our mind it is always necessary for us to be passive in the beginning; some idea must first present itself so that our train of thought may be initiated. Only in the presence of this idea are we able to relinquish other, successive trains of thought dependent upon the idea, or freely second them.
In fact, when we want to reason, we first have to know what we wish to think about. But the subject of our thought is either given to us or chosen by us. If it is given, what we have said must be true, namely, that the first idea is presented to us without any free choice on our part. If, however, we choose it for ourselves, our choice must fall on something that we already know, something already present to us. Some cognition present to the intellect must, therefore, precede every choice and decision that we make about using our intellective faculties. It is true, of course, that one series of reasoning causes another, but various series of reasonings connected as causes and effects can be regarded as a single act of reasoning in the midst of which stands some first idea not called into being or chosen by us, but coming into our mind of itself, spontaneously. Its origin certainly depends on the impressions we receive from external objects.
Even more important than the impression of other external factors is contact with others from which also we receive the occasions and beginnings of our first mental processes, and hence a greater ability for moving quickly with our thought from one object to another. External society, therefore, provides internal society with its principle of growth.
161. Granted the principle of development of our human faculties, we must now examine the means through which we arrive at transporting our act of intellect freely from one object to another. This means is speech, which we receive from external society. The first objects to present themselves to us are real, feelable objects. Our first acts therefore must pertain to the faculty of perception and of full ideas.(50) The object of an act is, when attained, a resting place for the act. All that the mind can do, therefore, however many real objects present themselves to us, is to remain fixed in contemplation of one or more of them, without proceeding further. If these objects were no longer present to the senses, we would have only their images, the full ideas, and thoughts about them in the treasure of our fantasy and memory. These consequences of perception would then fall quite quickly into a state of inadvertence, from which we could not revive them without some casual movement of the brain or some new, external impression upon us.
In this state, we find no reason permitting our mind to move as it pleases from one object to another. Because each object has its own individual, separate existence from that of others, the mind would rest in each of them or in many as if they were one, but it could not pass freely from one to another, or from one collection of ideas to another. It is impossible to maintain that such a passage could come about through the relationships binding these objects together. Relationships can be known only through the faculty of abstraction, which would not be developed in the human state we are discussing. Nor could it ever be developed without speech. Our faculty of abstraction consists in considering an object not in its entirety but in one of its simple qualities, recognised as discoverable also in innumerable other objects. Our intellect, if it is to pass from the object contemplated as a whole to concentrate separately on some particular quality in the object, needs the ability to move itself freely. If, however, the abstract idea presupposes that we have a capacity for moving the intellect from one object of our attention to another, the idea is not sufficient to explain the capacity it presupposes.
162. When, however, we receive speech from society, we immediately acquire dominion over our own intellect. Speech contains words indicating abstract ideas, and words indicating full ideas. The second group enables us to acquire the ability to recall objects as we please, even when they are no longer present to our senses and mind. The first group enables us to be stimulated to advert exclusively to the particular qualities of things and so to form abstractions for ourselves. Having formed abstractions, we know immediately the logical relationships which pertain to the abstractions. And relationships are the paths, as it were, along which the mind can pass from one thing to another.
163. The mind becomes master of its thoughts through speech; human freedom is born. It is true that the mind still has to receive the principle of movement from some idea that has entered thought almost casually, as it were, but once this has occurred it is words as such which open to us the paths of thoughts along which they enable us to travel.
164. It may be objected of course that the intellect cannot pass from a sign to the thing designated before the formation of the idea of relationship; sign and designated are relative terms. The difficulty vanishes if we consider that the passage of our attention from the word to the thing does not come about because we know the relationship between the sign and that which is designated. The word is a physical stimulus which, in striking the ear and arousing sound, simultaneously calls our intellective attention to think of the harmony between that sound and other sounds, and between that sound and the objects of all the other senses. At the same time our intellect interprets all these objects in their context.
A series of sounds forming a discourse presents our ear with what we may call a rational sensation, that is, with a sensation modified by fixed rules in harmony with all the objects which we perceive contemporaneously and successively. The intellect perceives the order that contemporaneous sensations have with the word, and that order explains to it the word itself. Finally, the word draws our intellective attention to what it signifies, even when this word alone is present to the intellect.
We may clarify this fact by recalling that sense and intellect are both capable of repeating easily acts which they have carried out on other occasions. Consequently, a single part of an object already seen is sufficient stimulus to recalling the entire object. Similarly, the sound of a word recalls objects which, on other occasions, were perceived together with the sound.(51)
165. It is through the word, therefore, that we succeed in moving our attention as we please over a multitude of objects; it is through the word that we acquire mastery over our faculties, and make ourselves masters of our affections (which depend upon the objects we contemplate) and free rulers of our external actions. But where does the word come from?
It comes from society, as we said. This sacred deposit is preserved and communicated by tradition from generation to generation. We owe to society the means of development of our various faculties and of all our perfection. Speech, in so far as it is furnished with lofty, general, abstract ideas, furnishes matter for prolonged thought. The state of various languages explains in great part the degrees of development of different nations. My own opinion is that this has not been sufficiently considered by historians of humanity’s gradual growth in civilisation. On the other hand, speech follows the state of the society which uses it. This becomes more apparent as we consider speech closer to the origins of nations.
166. We now have to consider the second advantage of human society which, as we said, consists in the support it provides in the face of human, moral weakness. This support consists in education, good example and various stimuli to carrying out social good. We have already seen that social good is at least a rudiment of universal good. In speaking about the common society in which nature draws all human beings together, and which has no special aim but the general good of humanity, we find that our uncertain, hesitant intellect finds at least temporary, provisional rest for its doubts. Here it can remain at rest and draw strength to undertake more substantial reasoning. The heart also, tired and oppressed in its effort to practise virtue, finds assistance in its labours through the society of others; it hopes, and comforts itself by means of honest, temporary amusements and swift reward for its merits.
Society, therefore, is the mistress of human beings, to whom she presents the principles of perfection, and whom she helps and encourages in the use of these principles. Only rarely are persons capable of standing on their own feet and pursuing good without the continual moral assistance administered by society, the means through which the majority of people obtain the perfection of which they are capable. This becomes more obvious when we consider the means that every society possesses for restraining socially bad members, and defending from injury and harm those who are socially good.
167. Finally, society extends our existence. This is its third benefit. To the extent that we all are bound together, the feeling of one’s own forces is strengthened in each of us; the habitual feeling of existence is augmented through the existence of all other humans to whom the individual feels himself bound. This feeling of a more expansive life, extended to a great degree beyond self, becomes so attractive and dear to the human heart that the pleasure of living in other persons overcomes and sometimes renders weak or insensible the feeling of one’s own individual life, of one’s own interior nature and of the invisible objects within. Good then degenerates into evil. Often we give ourselves excessively to what is external; internal factors become extremely weak, external enjoyments extremely strong.
People think nothing of what is within, everything of what is without. This is the only explanation of the common, material error which places all human happiness in attending to the limitation, multiplicity and attractiveness of external bonds, and in abstracting totally from the interior state of the spirit. The opposite also occurs: the few who love a perfect, truly sublime state consider an excessive number of accidental, exterior bonds as superfluities impeding their eagerness to press on to lofty, pure virtue, and distracting them from the ennoblement they could gain from solitary, sublime thoughts.
168. But we do not want to speak here about such exalted and extraordinary souls. We simply want to draw attention to what we said about the way in which human beings bind themselves through natural relationships to persons and things around themselves, and thus expand their own existence by forming for themselves a circumference of objects belonging to them almost in the way their own bodies do. Chief amongst these objects are the persons with whom they form society.
Thus society itself becomes end for every human being, not because our end must serve society, but because society and human beings become a single thing, just as the spirit and the body surrounding it become a single thing. This explains why a father feels he is defending himself when he defends his own family. In its members he does not see beings distinct from himself, but vital parts of his own existence. His reason and his heart carry him into all those parts and make him live in them. In the same way, every member of more extended societies forms with his fellows (in so far as he is united with them — the work of his intelligence) a single existence, a single moral person, for whom he desires and obtains all that he desires for himself, and from which he distances all that he distances from himself [App., no. 3].
Notes
(50) Cf. OT, 509.
(51) Cf. OT, 521–522; AMS, 439–468.