LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

      7. For a concise statement of the philosophical argument against a doctrine of progress based upon biological evolution, see Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic, pp. 105, 106.

      Sociology must concern itself with ends; and it must do so at its own beginnings. If this means that it has to forfeit its claim to a strictly scientific status, so be it. There is no virtue in replying that the question of ends is an affair of speculation and hypothesis. That is indeed true; but it cannot be helped. We are compelled to speculate concerning ends since there is no other way of reaching a conception of them. And there is no harm in speculation so long as it starts from the soundest available premises, and its conclusions are not hardened into dogma. Sociology will hardly rise above an academic futility until it abandons its obsession to rank as a pure science and makes bold to define however tentatively the goal toward which social processes should be directed. Let it by all means make its surveys and collate its statistics unremittingly; but these things it ought to do and not to leave the other undone.

II

       Table of Contents

      Yet it becomes plain, immediately we begin to discuss this question of ends, that if we exclude definitely religious considerations from the argument, we cannot indicate an end that has the character of a real end, that is, an absolute ultimacy. It is indeed questionable how far even the religious postulate directly provides the conception of an end, except to the comparatively small company of people who are strongly mystical by nature. The Shorter Catechism taught us that the chief end of man was to seek God and to glorify Him for ever, but to most of us this brings not information but bewilderment; and Mr. Kipling’s paradise where the painter “draws the thing as he sees it for the God of things as they are” is attractive but elusive. The truth appears to be that for the multitude of religiously disposed persons, the sense of God becomes effectual for conduct only as it dramatises itself in the form of a social vision or a personal relationship; and the ascendency of Jesus in the Christian tradition is explained by the power He has possessed of inviting that unreserved personal loyalty through which the sense of God assumes reality for common men. Such a phrase as “the glory of God” describes not our knowledge but our ignorance. All the content which can intelligibly be given to it is that there is an ideal end toward which we are called to move. This, however, does not mean that it is barren of immediate effect on conduct. We know that throughout history it has had the power to evoke a supreme disinterestedness in people who have been sensitive to it. It is, of course, akin to what Mr. Benjamin Kidd calls “the emotion of the ideal;” and it is related closely to the characteristic poetic anticipation and hope expressed in such passages as Tennyson’s in which he speaks of the “one far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves.”

      But disinterestedness and “the emotion of the ideal,” while they are essential to any kind of healthy social existence afford but slender foundation for a positive social policy. No moral attitude or emotion will carry us far except it be evoked by an ideal which can dramatise itself in terms of a more or less achievable undertaking. We are therefore compelled to relinquish the hope of a definition of absolute social ends, and must be content with something more modest and manageable. We may at least attempt to indicate certain proximate social aims. Even if we cannot hopefully describe the ultimate goal of life, we may reasonably endeavour to answer the question—What do we want our social organisation to produce? Just what results are we to aim at? That some such discussion as this is involved in any fruitful handling of the question of social integration is clear from the fact that the conception of an aim is either implicit or explicit in all attempts to formulate a social polity ever since Aristotle defined the aim of the Republic as the promotion of the good life. But this definition, like Mill’s “greatest good of the greatest number” raises further questions—What is the nature of the good? What is the characteristic note and quality of the good life? This indeed takes us to the very centre of our problem; for at last the controversy between the militarist and the pacifist, the protectionist and the free-trader, the authoritarian and the libertarian, springs from differing conceptions of the good life. This is not to say that either party has worked out a reasoned conviction on the point. Both appear to start from certain instinctive acceptances, determined largely by temperamental variations—which points to the need of a rigorously rationalistic exploration of this entire region. Mr. Graham Wallace speaks of “the organisation of happiness”; but as he himself perceives, he is speaking in paradox. It seems in any case improbable that our social aims can be defined in terms of an emotional state.

III

       Table of Contents

A good deal of confusion has been introduced into this subject by a tendency to regard society itself as an end. In much modern thought upon the matter, the individual is conceived as attaining his own end through his due contribution to the life of the group. The extreme development of this view is to be found in the German doctrine of the state, a doctrine which prevails in more or less perfection wherever the Hegelian philosophy has struck its roots.^[8] On this view, the individual has neither function nor end which is not to be expressed in terms of his own personal subordination to the state. He is a cog in the wheel, and no more. The modern dogma of progress has reinforced this view to some extent; as has also the obsession of size, which is one of the by-products of our extended knowledge of the physical universe and which has had the effect of minimising the significance of the single life. But whatever the causes to which this view is attributable, its influence on sociological thought is beyond question. It has been assumed, with varying explicitness, that the supra-personal end which the individual is to serve is to be identified with the social group to which he belongs. It is his appointed purpose to minister to the happiness of the group or to increase its efficiency as a military or economic unit.

      8. The devout Hegelian who dislikes the Prussian doctrine of the state is nowadays at some pains to explain that Hegel’s view of the state does not cohere quite congruously with the rest of his philosophy.

      (a) It may be urged against this view that the antithesis which it implies between the individual and the group is fallacious. For the group is composed of individuals and it cannot have a conscious end except in the minds of the individuals who compose it. There is a degree of truth in speaking of the “personality” of a group so long as the analogy is not pressed too far. A group may have a common thought and may unite in a collective act; but to say that a group has a definite “personality” of its own is to carry the process of abstraction too far. A group attains to consciousness only in the several minds of its members. Moreover social ends must take shape in individual lives. That the individual should serve a social end is true; it is equally true that the social aim must be achieved in the character and experience of individuals. For if they are not realised in persons, where shall they be realised? If our ultimate social aims do not become effective in the single life, they remain mere abstractions, existing only in a speculative thought and never reaching the point of actuality. But it serves us as little to insist on the converse of this view and to assert that the end of society is the individual. The truth would rather appear to be that the individual is to reach his own end in and through a society which it is his first business to create. Personal self-realisation and social integration will proceed pari passu. The individual and the group will find themselves in each other; the great soul and the great society will arrive together. But from the nature of the case, we must seek the clue to the character of right social aims through a study of personality, and of what is involved in its self-realisation.

      (b) A further objection to this view is that it subordinates personality to aims that are limited and sectional. In practice it may make good Germans, but almost certainly it cannot make good men. While it is better for a man to serve the narrowest social group than to serve his self-regard, yet the exclusiveness of the social group as it is identified with the

Скачать книгу