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Psychological Monographs
Voi. X
No. 7.
April 1909
Whole No, 41
THE
Psychological Review
EDITED BY
J. MARK BALDWIN
HOWARD C. WARREN
CHARr,E^ :
Yale UNivzusirr
/ the Psychological Mc
The Soci'il Will
r\;. .
Edwin Andre wJHajLden
nation presented to the University faculty of the University of
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Psychological Monographs
Vol. X April 1909
No. 2 Whole No. 41
THE
Psychological Review
EDITED BY
J. MARK BALDWIN HOWARD C. WARREN
Johns Hopkins University Princeton University
AND
CHARLES H. JUDD
Yale University
{Editor of the Psychological Monographs)
The Social Will
BY
Edwin Andrew Hayden
Dissertation presented to the University faculty of the University of
Michigan for the degree of doctor of philosophy
THE REVIEW PUBLISHING COMPANY
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INTRODUCTION.
The following thesis has grown out of general studies in soci-
ology and psychology which I prosecuted under the direction of
Professor Cooley and Professor Pillsbury. So far as anything
new is offered in the thesis, I may say it consists in this: that
the processes rather than the products of collective mental activ-
ity have been kept systematically in mind. Suggestion and
imitation have received very little attention, in the belief that
they contain practically nothing beyond what was alread)^ a
matter of common possession in the doctrines of association
and apperception. I believe that the conception of a social
personality as a collective total organized out of mental systems
that interact in definite ways, is of more fundamental significance.
193380
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
Chapter I — The Social Consciousness.
Section i. Spencer's distinction between animal and social groups in respect
to parentage and cooperation, merely biological.
S. 2. Reciprocity of thought and feeling the matter of social importance.
S. 3. Two kinds of communities, the instinctive and the social. The nature
of instinctive communities most clearly revealed by the life of insect families.
Some other animal groups present a transitional stage.
S. 4 and 5. The human mind the only truly social mind.
S. 6. Language a social necessity. It is the most delicate instrument for the
communication of thought and feeling.
S. 7. The content of the cultured mind, i. e., the ideas with which it is
stocked, largely social in their nature. Illustrations of this fact furnished by
different subjects of study.
S. 8. Mental development culminates in two universes of fact and feeling:
the objective, relating to the physical order; and the subjective, relating to the
personal order. These two are somewhat confused in the mythologic mind.
Chapter II — The Social Personality.
S. I. Two fundamental processes in the social mind, desire and belief. Dif-
ference between reactions of animals and purposive control.
S. 2. Conditions under which desire arises.
S. 3. Theoretical desires arise in connection with mythologic thought.
S. 4. But for the most part knowledge is at first subordinated to practical
needs. This is true of the average mind of even an advanced social order.
Mental division of labor assigns the task of thinking to a select few.
S. 5. Personal ideas play a considerable part in directing the activity of the
imagination.
S. 6. The specific content of desire is a matter of history.
S. 7. The psychological nature of belief. Emotion in belief: case of Knox
and Loyola.
S. 8. World of sensible experience the ultimate universe of reality. Asso-
ciation changes the memories of history at times into unrealities.
S. 9. Native attitude of the mind one of belief. Faith necessary to the men-
tal health of a people. Beliefs are outgrown. Social development tends to make
the sphere of desire and belief coincident.
S. 10. Desire and belief systematically coordinated through the activity of
the will.
S. II. Psychological nature of the collective will.
S. 12. Collective deliberation a possibility, though less controlled than that
of the individual mind. The state expresses a collective will. Bryce quoted on
the work of the state.
\
11 TABLE OF CONTENTS
S. 13. Psychological nature of the ends of the state. Voluntary control in
private associations.
S. 14. The concept of social personality. The social disposition.
S. 15. Habit in collective volition. The development of the individual will
a process of infoldment of the social will.
S. 16. Conditions under which ephemeral beliefs arise.
Chapter III — The Systematization of Belief.
S. I. Primitive beliefs grow by association.
S. 2a. Mental systems are in part implicit in the social mind. Conditions
for the unfoldment of the social mind.
S. 2b. Beliefs are organized into a few fundamental systems, which are
united in the self.
S. 3. Two types of mental systems: associative and apperceptive, both fig-
uring in the historical development of thought.
S. 4. Nature of apperceptive systems. Relation of apperception to inven-
tion and imitation. Illustration from the history of the theory of natural selection.
S. 5. The spread of ideas through the social medium.
S. 6. Recency.
S. 7. Intensity and vividness.
S. 8. Joint Activity.
S. 9. Repetition, condition the vigor of mental systems.
S. 10. Interrelation.
S. II. Two classes of cognitive systems, conceptual and perceptual. Theii
interaction in the development of knowledge.
S. 12. Systems of social concepts. All conceptual systems modified by sub-
stitution and combination.
S. 13. Concepts may at times be formulated with more logical precision
than the existing state of facts warrants.
S. 14. Resistance to the spread of ideas. Mental conflict in the social and
individual mind. Conflict settled by discussion or force.
S. 15. Conditions of mental systems that cause conflict.
S. 16. Solution of conflict by force.
S. 17a. Conflict in the social mind marks a period of history.
S. 17b. Conflict causes social thought to return on itself.
S. 18. Sometimes a permanent division of opinion is the outcome of mental
strife.
S. 19. Mental conflict necessary to self-consciousness.
S. 20. Sentiments cannot be bodily transferred from one culture to another.
Chapter IV — ^The Consciousness of Moral Right.
S. I. The interaction of individual minds takes place with varying degrees
of intimacy in respect to the self.
S. 2. When the interaction lies within some cognitive system, consciousness
of self is reduced to a minimum.
S. 3. Some desires are connected with ideal universes. Moral desire is desire
for an ideal self, and must be united with belief in order to have any practical
effect on consciousness.
S. 4. The universe of the ideal self is social. The ideal self is imagined as
achieving its career under the special historic conditions of the social order.
TABLE OF CONTENTS. ill
S. 5. The relation of the self to others in the moral universe. Inclusive
social ideals possess higher moral worth.
S. 6. Moral evil considered as a condition of mental conflict.
S. 7. Various forms of the aberration of the moral will.
S. 8. Fragmentary character of the immoral life.
S. 9. Variations of the social ideal limited by heredity and use.
S. 10. The social utility of ideals.
S. iia. Nature of the social ideal. Collective ethics usually inferior in value
to individual.
S. lib. The higher form of collective ethics means more comprehensive
apperceptive control in the social mind.
S. 12. Springs of moral action kept healthy only by effort.
S. 13. The primary moral feelings attach most firmly to the ascendant per-
sonal universe of the individual. The will of the family group and the will of
the state grow out of the tribal will.
S. 14. Ceremony of adoption extends the sphere of moral obligation.
S. 15. The special morality of social groups.
S. 16. Moral values changed by historical experiences.
S. 17. Principles of morality stand in vital relation to the mental and moral
health of the individual and social will.
Chapter V — ^The Consciousness of Legal Right.
^S. I. The social will lacks the unity of the individual will, but is motived by
more numerous and more comprehensive ends. It aims at ends of general
validity, as seen, for instance, in what it effectuates through the instrumentality
of the law.
^S. 2. The social will reacts upon the individual negatively in the way of
restraint exercised through the medium of the law. Effect of punishment. The
social will also reacts in a more positive fashion through the direct encouragement
and assistance which it gives the individual.
S. 3. Personality of the judge in relation to the application of the law. Judi-
cial opinion a collaboration.
S. 4. Consciousness of the law varies in the different social groups. Most
completely organized about group interests. Vigorous enforcement of the law
strengthens the feeling of legal right.
S- 5,6,7,8. Conditions that determine the vigor of the feeling of legal right.
S. 9. Enforcement of a right by the state increases the general stability of
rights.
S. 10. Mental conflict an important condition in the development of the
consciousness of legal right.
S. II. Extent to which the individual feels the law as a constraint
S. 12. The atomistic view of political relations looks upon the state as the
mechanical opposite of the individual.
S. 13. Desire for freedom is preeminently a social desire.
S. 14. Social institutions define the feeling of right. Relation of custom to
the feeling of legal right. Habits of private life an important element in the
matter of public control.
S. 15. Consciousness of a common weal varies considerably in the history
of culture. The higher forms of civic idealism.
IV TABLE OF CONTENTS.
S. i6. Reality of a national ideal. It exists interconnected with other motives
of inferior moral worth in the historic process which has organized the social
will in the state.
S. 17. The state immanent in the reciprocal relations existing between the
individuals of a social order.
Chapter VI — The Social Will as Expressed in the State: the Theory
OF Sovereignty in its Psychological Bearings.
S. I. Social psychology in political philosophy.
S. 2. Two psychologic facts basic to an understanding of the subject —
the reality of the individual and the reality of the social will.
S. 3. Sovereignty in the usual sense in which the term is employed presup-
poses a well developed social consciousness.
S. 4. Sometimes a partial or group will becomes ascendant. Mental effects
of despotic authority.
S. 5. Ascendancy more organic in some instances, as in the supremacy of
British rule in India.
S. 6. Highest organic contact possible when the law-making power is native.
S. 7. In times of social confusion, there is no social will, and sovereignty in
the sense of power exercised according to standards of right exists only in a
limited way.
S. 8. The mode of determining the membership of the governing body is
only indirectly related to individual freedom. Essential requirement is that the
governing body should be responsive to the needs of the people.
S. 9. A close interdependence exists between political and other social insti-
tutions.
THE SOCIAL WILL.
BY
Edwin Andrew Hayden.
CHAPTER I.
THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS.
1. In discussing the phenomena which distinguish social
groups from others, Mr. Spencer writes of insect communities as
follows : " . . . . though insects exhibit a kind of evolution much
higher than merely organic — though the aggregates they form
simulate social aggregates in sundry ways; yet they are not true
social aggregates. For each of them is in reality a large family.
It is not a union among like individuals independent of one
another in parentage and approximately equal in capacities; but
it is a union among the offspring of one mother, carried on, in
some cases for a single generation, and in some cases for more;
and from this community of parentage arises the possibility of
unlike classes having unlike structures and consequent unlike func-
tions. Instead of being allied to the specialization which arises
in a society, properly so-called, the specialization which arises in
one of these large and complicated insect families is allied to
that which arises between the sexes. Instead of two kinds of
individuals descending from the same parents, there are several
kinds of individuals descending from the same parents; and
instead of a simple cooperation between two differentiated indi-
viduals in the rearing of offspring, there is an involved coopera-
tion among sundry differentiated classes of individuals in the
rearing of offspring.''^
2. Spencer has in the foregoing indicated some distinctions
of fundamental importance, especially in the idea that insect
groups are more like an expanded family than a society strictly
^ Principles of Sociology, vol. i, pp. 5-6.
EDWIN ANDREW HAY DEN,
so-called. Wundt has expressed the same idea more forcibly by
saying that the so-called ** animal states" are "sexual commu-
nities, in which the social impulse that unites the individuals, as
well as the common protective impulse, are modifications of
the reproduction impulse."^ But the fact that in most commu-
nities differentiation of function is based upon a thoroughgoing
differentiation of structure, so that individuals performing unlike
services are physically unlike, possesses no more than a biolog-
ical significance. The important thing, so far as these and
other animal groups are taken to be the precursors of real soci-
eties, is the way in which the individual comes to share in the
group life — ^to what extent the group life modifies his life and
how far the group life is plastic; that is, how far it is capable of
change through the organization of its own economy. Defining
society as an organized total of thought, feeling and volition, we
find only human groups to be truly social; so that we cannot
take mere reciprocity of services, as is likely to be done in a nar-
row economic view, to be the measure of social development. ^
We do not count the slaves of Athens an integral part of the
Athenian society, but rather look upon them as the physical or
economic background of the small group of free citizens, among
whom there went on an active exchange of thought and feeling.
A society is animated by a common consciousness of historic
events, of traditions religious, political and industrial; and it is
chiefly in so far as economic relations modify these contents of
the social mind that exchange of services is a matter of impor-
tance to the sociologist. So long as foreign merchants at Rome
were mere traders with the Roman people, they did not consti-
tute an integral part of Roman society; but when through the
business relations created, and more particularly through other
relations arising from the marriages which they contracted with
Roman citizens, it became necessary for the courts of Rome to
deal with cases between the stranger and the citizen, and thus to
gradually develop a system of legal rules defining their rights,
there was going on a process of assimilation, changing something
which was in its inception merely economic, into something to
^ Outlines of Psychology, 2d ed., p. 311.
' See Tarde: Laws of Imitation , p. 64.
THE SOCIAL WILL. 3
a degree social.^ The foreigner was then beginning to share
something of the desires, thoughts, and feehngs of the citizen.
Reciprocity of thought, of feehng, of desire, of motive to action,
rather than reciprocity of service is the real index of social rela-i,
tions.
3. In respect to the mental characters displayed, communi-
ties may be divided into tv^o widely contrasted types, the instinc-
tive and the social. Insect communities are the best examples
of instinctive groups, while a modern state, as a highly organ-
ized purposive association, is the best example of the social.
The mentality of an individual in an instinctive group is largely
predetermined at birth. The individual inherits a reflex ner-
vous mechanism in which a perfected correlation exists between
certain sensory stimuli and certain movements essential to its
welfare. Many naturalists are inclined to regard the instinctive
acts of wasps, bees and ants as pure mechanical reflexes, the
most successful attempt to show this being probably that of
Bethe.2 If this view is true the only psychical attributes which
can be attributed to these animals are, in accordance with the
usual postulates of physiological psychology, a certain amount
of sensation and feeling due to the sensory stimulation, either
from external objects or from the movements themselves. Use
does not seem to modify to any appreciable extent the acts of
these individuals : so that the particular act is performed about
as well the first time as ever and then only in response to imme-
diate excitation. Whenever the excitation occurs, the response
follows, no matter if the present conditions under which it occurs
involve collateral results of a detrimental nature. It is a matter
of frequent occurrence that the same instinct is found in various
degrees of perfection among allied species; and this fact with
other evidence, strongly supports the view that slow mutations
do occur in the mental constitution of instinctive groups. This
change is brought about by the selection of inborn variations,
and not through the transmission of habits, which latter means
some capacity for learning on the part of the individual. Nat-
' For a brief account of the Roman Law of the Nations, above referred to,
see Bryce, Studies in History and Jurisprudence, p. 570 fF.
^ Pfliiger's Archiv. f. Physiol., vol. 70.
EDWIN ANDREW HAYDEN.
ural selection at once reconciles the apparent contradiction of
individual rigidity and specific plasticity in a thoroughly satis-
factory manner.
4. When we pass to other animals, we do not find instincts
so highly speciaHzed nor so mature at birth. Habit steps in to
perfect the instinct; that is to say, repetition improves the inher-
ited coordination between stimulus and movement. In conse-
quence of this less perfect inborn connection, instincts are in
these cases both more adaptable and transitory. It is a well
known fact that the instincts of many wild animals are some-<^^^
what modified by domestication and further, in the absence of
proper conditions to excite the instinctive act, the instinct may
die out. The gain in having instincts vague and general lies in
the accommodation to circumstances which is thus secured: the
loss lies in the lack of definiteness and precision of coordination.
To the extent that instinct is highly specialized, is the mental
life of the individual limited to processes directly connected with
the instinct. This limitation is especially evident in the case of
animals whose life shows an organization of mental processes
standing in immediate relation to two dominant instincts — the
sexual and the alimentative.^ It is doubtful, however, whether,
even in the case of animals which profit most by their experi-
ences, free ideas or representations are to any extent present;
and if present, they are probably aroused chiefly "on the spur
of the immediate practical advantage,"^ i. e., upon peripheral
stimulation. Such associations as animals do form seem to be
chiefly between sense impressions and impulses to activity.
Representations of various sorts are peculiarly a human posses-
sion. In the form of memory images of either the remote or
resident sensations of an act, they appear at a certain level of
mental development as a matter of utility to control action in
some cases as peripheral stimulation had done before. "With
the rise of language, experience became conventionalized,
and set rules replaced the less reliable images. These still per-
sist, however, (i) where arrangement and previsions do not per-
* See Wundt: Human and Animal Psychology^ sees. 23, 24, 27 and 28.
^ See monograph by Thorndike on Animal Intelligence.
THE SOCIAL WILL. 5
mit linguistic statement, and (2) as phantasy images."^ Briefly,
the processes of the mental life of animals do not extend much
beyond what Wundt terms passive apperception, and at best,
there can be but faint glimmerings of the mental processes
which we know in the human mind as understanding and imagi-
nation.
5. In the foregoing description of the animal mind, much
has, by implication, been said of the human or social mind. It
is not a mind in which there exist reason and instinct as parallel
psychic processes: it is a mind in which instinct still remains as'
impulses or tendencies to action which are perfected by training,
and which are controlled by a coordinated adaptation of means
to ends. Rationality, in other words, consists, to a large degree,
in the harmonious synthesis of the perfected impulses in a uni-
fied life of thought, feeling and action. But purposive control,
exercised through a knowledge of results, exists in all degrees
of perfection; so that we must take the difference between the
social and the sub-social to be one of degree rather than of
quality. Instinctive communities like those of ants and bees,
have, in one respect, the necessary basis for the development of
a social consciousness, viz, a continuous group-life, which
some of the higher species of solitary habits, like the gorilla, do
not possess. It is only in human groups that we find both requi-
sites to a collective consciousness, viz, continuity of the group
life and plasticity of the individual mind. Here the individual
mind gets a content and organization through its contact with
other minds; in fact in consequence of the rudimentary state of
its instincts, such contact and control is necessary to the perfec-
tion of its powers. The function of an organized social life in
the development of the individual mind is to furnish a definite
and continuous set of impressions and to organize these into
fundamental mental systems. In the case of unstable groups
like the Fuegians, the group life is too discontinuous, too inter-
mittent to permit the individual's mind to come in contact with
impressions sufficiently definite and varied for the organization
of a complex mentality. The most that we can expect in cases
^ Bcntley, The Memory Image, American Journal Psychology^ vol. xi, no. I,
P- 25.
6 EDWIN ANDREW HAT DEN.
where individual capacities are not much ampHfied by social
discipline beyond what they are at birth, is an acuteness of sense
discrimination, — a conclusion which the facts of comparative
human psychology support.^ I have intentionally used the
phrase, "acuteness of sense discrimination," rather than the
words used by Burton in writing of the Bedouins, viz, a "high
organization of the perceptive faculties,"^ for the reason that
perception, in a high degree of organization, implies appercep-
tive activities which only a social state can make possible. A
developed world of sense implies something more than the mere
capacity to discriminate impressions : it implies further the power
to compare them, and thus to discern deeper unity than the mere
contiguity of space or time. So far as thinking goes, the uncul-
tivated mind is content with the reproduction of concrete indi-
vidual experiences, and is unconcerned with the causal relations
of phenomena the perception of which requires much analysis
and abstraction. Hence in the classification of the objects of
experience such a mind seizes upon the obvious and superficial
attributes. The scientific mind, however, by the aid of delicate
instruments, which have been perfected by the combined thought
and effort of many generations, amplifies its powers of sensible
discrimination infinitely beyond those of the savage, and by
means of the capacity of analysis and abstraction which arises
in the social order, coordinates the impressions of sense into an
orderly world of cause and effect. In other words, the social
life has given him an apperceptive basis for the interpretation
of sensations, and this basis becomes more and more the condi-
tion of the way in which he perceives the external world. ^ This
fact has well been developed by Professor Dewey* in the follow-
ing passage: "Every higher analytic stage influences immedi-
ately the lower process, rendering it more definite. It is synthet-
ically combined with it. Every process of reasoning expands a
judgment; every judgment enlarges a concept; every concept
adds new meaning to a percept. As we universalize, we also
* See Spencer: Principles of Sociology ^ vol. i, ch. vii.
' Quoted by Spencer, op. cit., p. 78.
^ See Pearson's Grammar of Science^ ch. v, sec. II.
^ Psychology, ch. ix, Intuition. Consult the entire chapter.
THE SOCIAL WILL.
see the particular more in the light of the universal, and thus
make it more significant and more definite. . . . The
more the element of reasoning is involved, the more does the
percept mean, or tell us of the object. There is a complete
implication of every stage of self-development in every other.
The scale from perception to systematization looks at the devel-
opment as an analytic process of growing universality; the scale
from systematization back, looks at it as a synthetic process of
growing definiteness. As a matter of actual psychological fact,
there is no separation of ascending and descending movement,
but every concrete act of mind is an act both of perception and
reasoning, and each because of and through the other." In
brief, stimulation arouses in the cultivated mind apperceptive
processes by means of which external objects are cognized in
their general relations, but it arouses in the savage mind only
discrete existences. The necessity therefore of social life for the
full realization of the capacities of the mind, even in the domain
of sensation, is abundantly evident; and still more so when we
come to the higher phases of mental life and the more delicate
and subtle feelings and emotions. These latter arise only in
some social situation, involving the relation of self to others, and
presuppose some highly developed means of communication.
This we have in language.
6. The so-called language of animals can scarcely be called
a language, for signs discharge no further function than arous-
ing certain responses through a connection, largely inborn,
between certain sensations and certain movements. Gesture
language, which is so extensively employed by savages that have
a scanty vocabulary of articulate speech, can become a true
language, i. e., an expressive one, because it has in itself the
possibility of becoming an instrument in some degree of con-
ceptual thought. Gesture can express concepts of a low degree
of generality, i. e., "universals comprehending particular objects
as their subordinate elements; but they can only to a very limited
extent fix attention on universals having as their subordinate
elements other universals."* It is only in speech, however,
^ Stout: Analytical Psychology, vol. ii, p. 226.
EDWIN ANDREW HAT DEN.
either oral or written, that we find an instrument of expression
capable of responding to the complex needs of the civilized mind.
It is unnecessary here to enter into the psychology of thought
and language farther than to remark that words come to have
significance through contiguous association with the various
apperceptive systems of the mind. What I desire to do is to
specify a little more carefully how speech functions as a social
process. First of all, conventional language is a system of signs
of "extreme flexibility, ''^ to borrow Kuelpe's term. Composed
of a few articulate elements, it is capable of combining these into
an indefinite number of word complexes that can express all
varieties of objects, qualities and conditions. Linguistic inven-
tion, which at certain stages of social culture, is as much an
impulse or desire as other kinds of social invention, forms in
accordance with the general laws of the language new words
and phrases which are readily assimilated with the old stock.
In this way language soon becomes an instrument perfectly
subservient to the will of man. Being a temporal rather than a
spatial complex, it is more adequate to deal with the continuity
of our mental hfe than other forms of expressions, such as paint-
ing and sculpture. A statue may portray a single emotion or
situation in a manner that surpasses verbal description; but in
the complex relations of life, where time relations are important
elements, and where for practical volition it is necessary that
mental systems should be unfolded in their details, language is
alone adequate to the task. Again, language fixes permanently
our systems of conceptual thoughts. I do not mean by this that
concepts do not change with the progress of civilization, but
rather verbal description enables us to understand a conceptual
system, no matter how long since it may have been expressed.
We have no trouble in understanding Newton's views on the
nature of light, although the corpuscular theory is no longer
held. Provided we have had the requisite experience and have
competent powers of understanding, we can, by saturating our-
selves with his writings, organize in our own minds to a consid-
erable degree, the apperceptive systems acting in his, and thus
come to understand something of the nature of his achievements.
^ Outlines of Psychologyy p. 14.
THE SOCIAL WILL.
Language thus makes possible the transmission of acquired \
knowledge from one generation to the next; and in this way the j
cooperation of individual minds extends in point of time far (
beyond the allotted span of life.
! 7. Thus the cultured mind bears in its type or quality unmis- \
takable evidence of its social origin; and it is equally true that I
its contents, or in other words, the ideas with which it is stocked, /
are but individual totals interconnected in a collective mental /
process. Not only does the child's hereditary equipment in the
way of instincts and capacities imply a social history, but the
discipline which transforms this heritage into a reality is social
to the last degree. The pedagogical romanticism which holds
that the human mind can be developed by the indiscriminate
and fortuitous play of physical forces upon the senses is a delu-
sion from top to bottom. The child's earliest experiences with
physical things is under the guidance of persons, and so habitual
is the association of persons with things that he at first views
physical objects almost entirely from the standpoint of social
utilities. It is a long time before he is able to make complete
abstraction of the personal element in the way in which it is
done in such objective sciences as chemistry and physics. A
horse for instance does not mean an object of certain anatomical
and physiological characteristics, but something on which he
can ride, which his father owns, etc. His attitude is rather that
of primitive man in the stage of mythologic thought. The sav-
age reads into nature his own thoughts and feelings, and sees in
natural forces personalities of various kinds. So predominant
in fact is the personal bias in the savage theory of things that
it has been given the significant title of "personalism." And
the general features of this mode of thought are found to be so
uniform among people in a certain grade of mental develop-
ment, even in the entire absence of historic contact, that the
tendency of the human mind to think in personal terms must be
classed as one of its fundamental traits. So the child, in recap-
itulating the broad features of race history, shows the same
tendency toward a personal view of things. The whole system
of education through which he passes is largely a procedure
clarifying the relations which the immediate social facts, viz.
10 EDWIN ANDREW HAT DEN.
personal ideas, sustain to each other or to things. Aside from
a few theorems respecting the combination of numbers, arith-
metic is a quantitative exploitation of social relations in the busi-
ness world. Historically it is an evolution from a primitive
concrete social arithmetic which existed long before any theory
of pure number was thought of. Geography, too, is a social
discipline, being in fact the study of the earth as modified by
human action. And of course history in the political sense of
the term is preeminently a study of social relations and activi-
ties. The personal element, however much crowded into the
marginal regions of consciousness, remains an inseparable part
of the totality of conditions which make possible a study of
natural forces. In fact, the psychologist whose province of
study is the human personality in all phases of its manifestation,
is not dealing with an experience different as a manifold from
that which the physicist studies. The difference lies in the
point of view. The physicist makes abstraction of the personal
variation or event, or better treats it as a constant factor, by
giving the limits of error to his results, whereas the law of per-
sonal variation is precisely the thing of interest to the psychol-
ogist.
8. In the period of mythologic thought, the consciousness of
the individual self is beginning to emerge, as is evident in the
fact that primitive man projects his own thoughts and feelings
into the process of nature. Although he is for the most part
unaware of the fact of projection, yet the image of self, thus
reflected in nature, serves with tribal experience, as a nucleus
around which the feeling of self clusters. There is now felt a
kinship for nature which is wanting in the latter stages of scien-
tific thought. As soon as scientific investigation begins to dis-
cover regularity in the flow of natural events, the personalities
of nature are metamorphosed into natural processes, entirely
unconscious in themselves, and totally objective to the human
mind — processes which may thus become a matter of universal
apperception. But even then the personal feeling for nature
still remains in the religious and poetic consciousness, which
feels in the unity of nature the presence of an immanent reason.
CHAPTER II.
THE SOCIAL PERSONALITY.
A. Desire.
Tarde has analyzed the mental Hfe of society into two funda-
mental processes, desire and belief.^ I have accepted this analy-
sis as probably the most rational one in the present state of the
analytical psychology of the social mind.
I. Reaction, or movement in response to external stimula-
tion, is shown by all systems of energy. With some the stimu-
lation, although very slight, results in the immediate disintegra-
tion of the system; with others the stimulation produces a
temporary change in the configuration of the system, after which
the system regains its former condition. In the words of mechan-
ics, the first are said to be unstable, the second, stable systems
of energy. Living aggregates are the most complex specimens
of the second kind. We see both plants and animals going
through a coordinated series of activities which from the out-
side, seem to be under the guidance of some purpose or end.
Examined more closely, however, most of these activities are
found to lack the one essential feature of purposive control,
which is this : responding to new situations by an activity that
is due to an internal development and organization of impres-
sions. If an adaptation has been developed to an external ele-
ment A, which uniformly in the history of the species has been
associated with B and C, both harmless to the organism; and if
A is now connected in a concrete total consisting of D and E,
both harmful to the organism, but for which no inhibitive adjust-
ment exists, then the reaction to A will occur with the same
certainty as before, with perhaps death as a consequence, owing
to the harmful results coming from D and E. A survey of all
the facts relating to activity of this sort precludes the supposition
^ The Laws of Imitation, New York: Henry Holt and Company, p. 145.
12 EDWIN ANDREW HAT DEN.
that it has anything in it analogous to what we know in ourselves
as purposive or voluntary control. We describe behavior of
this sort in a negative way by saying that it is unleari\ed or
native; or, in other words, that it is the immediate expression
of the inherited constitution. It is the most widespread and
basic form of behavior in the animal kingdom. But in the
higher vertebrates, as has been already noted, these instinctive,
or native connections, are changed in the course of the individu-
ual's life, such modification being especially pronounced in the
case of man, with whom instinctive actions produce experiences
which, organized into memories, result in forming an idea of
the end or object toward which the striving is directed.
2. An impeded activity manifests itself in consciousness as
a longing or craving — a feeling of unrest, which, when processes
of attention and knowledge are developed, sets going a series of
mental changes that terminate in removing the feeling from
consciousness. These feelings are parts of an interconnected
process of ideational and affective elements which form a total with
clearly distinguished features. Such interconnection changes
the vague feeling into a definite one, conscious of the means of
satisfaction, that is, into a desire. The attachment of the feel-
ing to a specific ideational content marks the rise of voluntary
control. In the course of time a definite means of attaining the
object which satisfies a desire is selected. With this selection
comes the repetition of a definite set of experiences to which the
feeling adheres. The desire stretches over all the component
parts of the process of realization, and thus includes a represen-
tation of the means as well as of the end. In fact the means as
something existing apart from the end is an abstraction. In so
far as any part of the process of realization is unforeseen the
desire is vague and ill-defined. Conversely, to the extent that
any part of the process of realization becomes better defined is
the desire less impulsive. As the organization of experience
goes on a desire whose satisfaction involves the willing of a
complex act is likely to split up into a number of reciprocally
limiting and hence more specific desires, forming a system in
which there exist various degrees of subordination and ascend-
ency. Anything that arrests the process of realization at any
THE SOCIAL WILL. 1 3
particular point, emphasizes that part and tends to disengage
it from the total activity, and raise it to the status of an inde-
pendent voHtion. The detachment of a partial volition is also
facilitated by its functioning as a component of several volitional
processes. Again the particular experiences connected with a
partial volition may be a source of satisfaction in themselves,
independent of their connection in a more comprehensive proc-
ess. The ideal representation of this satisfaction is equivalent
to the formation of a new desire. The ascendency which a
desire may attain is limited in two ways: ist, by the relation of
the desire to the self, as being a member of the individual's
entire system of desires; and 2d, by the fact that the volitional
process through which a desire is realized, tends to become
automatic. Perfect coincidence between the appearance of a
want and its means of satisfaction would to a large extent do
away with that ideal representation which is the very essence
of desire. The only thing that will keep a periodic desire,
receiving full satisfaction from passing to the marginal regions
of attention, is some change of the circumstances in which it
recurs. Such change means a modification of the desire, so
that complete satisfaction is no longer obtained. The desire is
then again able to command the attention, and lead to the devis-
ing of new means of satisfaction.
3. Purely practical desires are far from constituting the
entire system of desires even in the case of primitive man. Spe-
cific desires of a non-utilitarian character soon appear in con-
nection with mythological systems. As soon as the mental
progress of a people has reached a point where wants are to
some extent anticipated, the mental life begins to expand beyond
the immediate present, and the imagination on the basis of
certain social experiences constructs an ideal world, where
desires quite remote from economic wants receive satisfaction.
In mythological systems, as is well known, we have a blending
of science, religion and philosophy, not only as regards the con-
cepts, but also the desires and beliefs peculiar to each. Out of
this complex the more intellectual desires of science and philos-
ophy detach themselves and culminate in the pure love of knowl-
edge for its own sake, while the other desires less directly con-
14 EDWIN ANDREW HATDEN.
nected to the order of sensible experience, become interconnected
in a separate system of moral and religious desire.
4. Knowledge, however, remains for a long time subordinated
to practical ends, that is, it remains imbedded in volitional
processes that aim to effect some change in the world of things.
The development of perception and images of memory is the
psychic side of a process which has for its other side the defini-
tion of motor activity. The attainment of an object of desire,
as already pointed out, necessitates the ideal representation of a
series of partial acts, and the more detailed such construction
the more perfect the satisfaction of the desire. Thus the selec-
tion of the best means of attaining a given end involves an in-
creasing amount of intellectual activity as experience expands.
Hence it happens that the apperceptive activities of relating and
comparing, of analyzing the mental aggregates formed by asso-
ciation out of the cognitive elements of motor experiences, may
arise in the course of practical activities. But deliberation on
the choice of means postpones the satisfaction by the amount of
time which it occupies, and thus conflicts in one way with the
realization of desire. The checking of a motor tendency weak-
ens it so that deliberation may be protracted to a point where
it defeats its own purpose. This antagonism between thinking
and doing is a matter of common observation. The practical
man seldom takes interest in theoretical questions, rarely engag-
es in mental activities that have no aim beyond affecting some
change in the world of ideas. It is by means of the social hered-
ity that a reconciliation of this conflict is secured. Individual
wills enter into a more comprehensive psychic process, the social
will, by which interconnection society is enabled to attain it sends
by a mental division of labor. In this way activities may be
going on simultaneously in the social mind that would be some-
what incompatible in the individual mind. Mental activity of
a theoretical sort is limited to one social group, and practical
endeavor to another. The final expression of some epoch-mak-
ing conception is invariably the work of some thinkers of trans-
cendent genius. Once the idea becomes articulate it spreads
through the social medium, and after its incorporation into the
fabric of social thought, it becomes a source of common desire.
THE SOCIAL WILL. 1 5
5. While we can speak with truth of the interaction of indi-
vidual wills in a higher or collective will, we should not forget
that the individual will is part of a concrete personality, and that
these personalities interact more or less in their entirety. Out
of this interaction arise the personal ideas and feelings which in
the period of primitive culture enter into the apperception of
the external world. Personal ideas and feelings are gradually
detached from the objective ideas and their related feelings,
because of the difference in the relation in which the two sets
stand to the will. This detachment does not extinguish the
system of personal ideas and feelings, for they continue to exist
in a world of their own, the world of social relations. The
separation between these worlds, however, is never complete,
for as a matter of history the two have ever interacted. Though
the universe of personal ideas and feelings ceases, in the course
of time, to influence immediate sensible experience, yet in the
larger and broader aspects of life, where religious faith finds
play, it ever remains of sovereign importance. When sensible
experience comes to check or suppress the fundamental impulses
of man, the will transforms the elements of social experience
into "an existence that fully corresponds to the wishes and
requirements of the human mind,"* forming the universe of
moral and religious belief.
6. The specific content which desire assumes, is a matter of
national history. Says Tarde: "Every organic want is experi-
enced in the characteristic form which has been sanctioned by
surrounding example. The social environment, in defining and
actualizing this form has, in truth, appropriated it. Even desires
for nutrition and reproduction have been transformed, so to
speak, into national products. Sexual desire is changed into a
desire to be married according to the diff^erent religious rites of
different localities. Desire for food is expressed in one place as a
desire for a certain kind of bread or meat; in another, for a cer-
tain kind of grain or vegetable."^ Desires are thus refined by
the social experience coming from the volitions which they them-
selves create. It may be said with Tarde that the means of
^ Wundt, EthicSy vol. i, p. 59.
^ Laws of Imitation^ p. 44.
1 6 EDWIN ANDREW HAYDEN.
satisfaction in a measure create the desire, for in defining and
particularizing it, they Hmit the lines along which volition moves
in its effort to satisfy the desire. This statement seems to be
contradicted by the fact that the means do not aWays lie in the
order of sensible experience. But in answer to this, it should
be noted, that desires attaching to a universe which the indi-
vidual regards as imaginary, are, as a rule, rather evanescent,
arising in connection with complex modes in the cognitive syn-
thesis of social experience, and further that imaginary creations
bear a close resemblance to the objects of sensible experience
so far as conditions of space, time and the general qualities of
human nature are concerned. Persistent desires, however, fail
to receive full satisfaction in the imaginary creation of the indi-
vidual, for there remains beneath all an abiding sense of the
unreality from which there is no escape, except in those cases
where the imaginary creation has been produced by the trans-
formation of historical experience and has thus acquired the
status of a belief.
B. Belief.
7. Another mode of consciousness in which the ideational
and affective compounds of experience are connected, is belief.
The representation of the satisfaction of desire involves a series
of specific affirmations which are not detached judgments but
interdependent parts of a total process connecting means and
end. Such interconnection is belief. Belief involves knowledge,
but is not identical with it, for we have perfectly clear and dis-
tinct ideas about many things that we disbelieve, as on the other
hand we believe some things of which our conceptions are by
no means the clearest. The multitudinous creations of fancy
recorded in the literature of the world, are things that do not
arouse in us the sense or feeling of reality. A cognition in order
to become a belief, must have some "fringe of consciousness''
added to it. It must be able to evoke in the mind an emotional
color in addition to the feelings of meaning and relationship
which, though evanescent, form the staple of the cognitive
consciousness. Belief stands in intimate relation to the self on
the affective side, and to the objective world on the cognitive
THE SOCIAL WILL. 1 7
side. Things which are a matter of common consent, being
acted upon from day to day as habit, are usually not regarded
in the light of behef, because the feeling of assurance, or the
"emotion of conviction,'' as it has been called by Bagehot, is
absent.^ When, however, some obstruction to our practical or
theoretical endeavor arises, leading to the postponement of
gratification, the mind is confronted with a situation in response
to which the feeling of the reality or unreality of some particular
thing emerges. Deep conviction is associated with strong feel-
ings. When such conviction is challenged the whole self recoils :
" Men in these intense states of mind have altered all history,"
writes Bagehot, "changed for better or worse the creeds of
myriads, and desolated or redeemed provinces and ages. Nor
is this intensity a sign of truth, for it is precisely strongest in
those points in which men differ most from each other. John
Knox felt it in his anti-Catholicism; Ignatius Loyola in his anti-
Protestantism; and both, I suppose, felt it as much as it was
possible to feel it."^ Both Knox and Loyola were one with the
cause for which they stood; the emotion of conviction assumed
a fanatical ascendency because of the intense self-feeling involved,
the belief in both cases commanding the whole resources of the
will. The rationality of a belief as measured by the criteria
of reality set up by science, is in general a matter of subordinate
importance, as the social function of belief is to organize the
fundamental desires of humanity, and to do this a belief must
possess strong affective elements. Religious and moral, and in
some instances political beliefs, possess these characteristics.
8. It may be said in a general way that the world of sensible
experience is taken commonly to be the ultimate universe of
reality. This attitude of strong conviction toward the reality
of the external world, arises, as Stout has clearly shown,^ from
the Hmitations which are imposed from without upon the
activity of the will. We find ourselves unable to manipulate
the objects of perception just to suit our fancy; in the effort to
do so the feeling of their reality clearly emerges. So too, when
^ Literary Studies y The Emotion of Conviction.
' Analytical Psychology^ vol. ii, pp. 239-243.
1 8 EDWIN ANDREW HATDEN.
we run across some stubborn fact of experience which blocks
all our processes of thought and refuses to be explained away,
we become painfully aware of the frailty of our ideal creations.
Thus thought combinations in proportion to the facility with
which they can voluntarily be altered lose the moments of
reality. It is especially for this reason that the mind is usually
alive to the unreality of the images of the imagination. In other
cases where the alteration has occurred independent of the will
as a matter of mere association or assimilation the mind is likely
to accept the modifications as real. The illusions due to preper-
ception are examples of this sort. Frequent repetition of a
thing makes us strongly disposed to believe in its reality: the
more often a psychic process is recollected, the less is the effort
necessary to restore it, so that while it is becoming more firmly
fixed in the memory, the mental experiences connected with
its invention are being forgotten. The fictitious idea, when
thus freed from all such associations, may find lodgment among
the true memories, and thus seem to the individual to refer to
some part of his past life. Association has brought the idea
within the circle of remembered sensible experience. The rate
at which the transformation of the contents of memory goes on
has much to do with the extent to which the feeling of unreality
is aroused by a fictitious idea. Frequently the memories of
history become changed in the course of centuries into unreali-
ties rivalling the boldest creations of fiction; yet so gradual has
been the change, that the mutations have escaped detection.
Such alteration of the memories of history frequently serves the
high purpose of allowing greater scope to the sway of social
ideals. In the period of mythologic thought sensible experience
does not conflict with monstrous beliefs in ghosts, demons, and
other supernatural agents, for the reason that nature then mir-
rors the capricious impulses of the savage, but as soon as per-
ceptions are brought under some concept of order, these beliefs
or those into which they are changed, are likely to be held valid,
not of the present order of things, but of some past or future
state of existence. If, however, such beliefs still remain potent
in their influence on human conduct, it is through the fact that
they still retain a stable connection with some system of sensible
experience.
THE SOCIAL WILL. 1 9
9. The native attitude of the mind toward its thought com-
binations is one of behef, an attitude which is checked through
painful experience. A successful issue, whether a matter of
accident or not, confirms the belief, and a few successful trials,
when disproof is difficult, are sufficient to firmly implant the
belief in the mind of the race. Something of this pristine faith
is necessary to the mental health of a people. Though many
of the cosmological beliefs of primitive man have disappeared
with the rise of science, yet no void has been left, for the reason
that science has brought to light innumerable uniformities in
natural phenomena. In fact, science has increased the sum
of faith in the objective order, and at the same time has expanded
the sphere of religious feeling. It is only when the impersonal
attitude of science is assumed toward all the departments of life
that human faith, which finds its most adequate expression in
religious faith, is on the way to extinction. The skepticism
which is present in a decadent civilization, is the result not so
much of its science and philosophy, as the moral disorder of the
social life, which makes the individual mind the theater of dis-
cordant and distracting impulses. Individual or social faith is
but an expression of life, after all. An harmonious, expansive
life has an abounding faith in the essential truth and goodness
of the world, while a life tormented by conflicting passions
accepts the same order with misgiving and doubt. ^ But at the
same time faith reacts upon life to expand or contract it. A
people outgrows some of its beliefs, just as an individual does.
Many beliefs which at one time in the history of a culture were
real organizing forces, come later to be obstacles to progress. The
belief in the divine right of kings, by the halo with which it
surrounded the regal head and the obedience it inspired, was a
powerful cementing political force in the more unenlightened
periods of social development, but the conception was certainly
obstructive in French history at the time of Louis XIV, when
impulses of democracy were beginning to express themselves
that were later lashed into the fury of the Revolution by the
stubborn resistance which they encountered. So monasticism,
though it did noble service in bringing hope and consolation to
^ See Paulsen: A System of EthicSy p. 421 fF; also James: Varieties of Religious
Experience, p. 41.
20 EDWIN ANDREW HATDEN.
minds distracted by the confusion and disorder following the
fall of Rome, was too narrow for the new life of the Renaissance.
In a similar way the political and economic conceptions had to
expand in order to compass the new social vitality in European
life produced by the discovery of the possibilities of the New
World.
The tendency of social development is to make the sphere of
desire and belief coincident. Every desire which remains unsat-
isfied, that is, detached from the affirmation of the means of
satisfaction, soon dies, as, on the other hand, no belief acquires
a permanent social ascendancy, which is not intimately con-
nected with the needs of humanity.
C. Desire and Belief in Relation to the Will.
10. Desire and belief are brought into systematic coordina-
tion through the activity of the will. Many desires and the
corresponding beliefs are different phases of the same total
psychic process in which impulsive acts become purposive
through the effects of memory. Other desires and beliefs are
independent of each other in origin except in so far as they have
a general connection in the same will or personality, and are
brought into coordination through apperception. It is in the
activity of the will that consciousness alters its contents in a
definite direction. Out of the ideational and affective experi-
ence connected with such control arises the notion and feeling
of self. As a result, desire and belief, through their intercon-
nection in volitional processes, stand in intimate relation to the
self. The universe of desire represents "recognition in feeling
of the distinction between the actual and the unreaHzed self,"^
while the universe of belief stands for the habitual attitude of the
self in affirming or denying the possibiHty of realizing desires.
The unification of desire and belief through the activity of the
theoretical or practical will, is eminently a social process. Those
phases of experience which are not directly modified by the will
form a total which the mind regards as independent of itself : while
^ Dewey: Psychology, p. 364.
THE SOCIAL WILL. 21
the Other phases subject to volitional control, form the contrasting
total of the self. Now in the early history of civilization, the separ-
ation of self and object is imperfect both in thought and feeling:
the increased cooperation of individual wills which comes with
social experience widens the sphere of sensible experience on the
one hand and on the other the sphere of internal experience con-
nected with self-activity. The final result is th at complete detach-
ment in thought and feeling of the self from the manifold of
perceptual experience, which is seen in its best estate in the
scientific consciousness. Out of the internal experience develops
not an isolated personality, but a consciousness of a plurality of
like selves, sharing a common life of thought, feeling and action.
II. The external expression of the social will is the activity
of social life. Individual wills are linked in associations of vari-
ous degrees of complexity, each association having interests,
desires and beliefs, in a word, a life peculiar to itself. Within
each group of individual wills are to be found common motives
to volition, with the result that group ends are achieved in a
more or less rational way. Individual wills are not, however,
of equal importance in the organization of motives. Within
certain limits the statement is true that the greater the number
of individual wills interacting the less deliberative, the less
rational, the resulting action. The final expression of a great
conception is as a rule the work of a few minds; the organization
of this into a social impulse is partly the work of suggestion and
partly of choice. Some writers, like Le Bon, seem to imply that
a collective mind really exists only at the moment when a group
of individual minds are simultaneously affecting each other as
in a crowd. We do not restrict the individual will to the complex
of ideas and feelings that happen to be above the threshold of
attention at a particular instant: and in an analogous way, there
seems to be no good reason for restricting the social will to the
sum of ideas and feelings appearing simultaneously in a group
of interacting minds.
12. While impassioned discussion upsets for the time being
all rational deliberation, nevertheless more temperate discussion
enables the individual to get glimpses of new and important
aspects of a subject which will assist him in the calm of his
22 EDWIN ANDREW HATDEN.
.'private moments to reach a more satisfactory solution of the
problem. While social deliberation does not attain the degree
of rationality and control which the processes of thought in a
highly endowed individual mind possess, yet it is far from
receiving justice at the hands of the theory of suggestion.^ The
most transcendent genius is connected through a graduated
series of capacities to the average mediocrity, so that the organi-
zation of public opinion is by no means a process consisting
first of all in the invention of an idea by one supreme mind, and
the subsequent incorporation of this idea in other minds by mere
association. Frequently the acceptance of an idea appears to
be automatic, when in reality the acceptance of the idea marks
the completion of a mental process whose development involved
complex apperceptive activities. Still it remains true that col-
lective thinking is in general less controlled than individual
thinking. An idea which has been perfected in one mind can-
not be communicated in its final form to another mind; the
second mind must repeat to some extent the process of develop-
ment which the idea underwent in the first mind, and in so
doing gives some play to association to bring in irrelevant ideas.
Today natural selection is a datum in reasoning on biological
matters; yet a quarter of a century nearly passed before the
idea became appercipient in the collective mind of biologists.
So far as the net gain in positive knowledge is concerned, much
of the thinking and feeling of that period was sheer waste of
mental energy. The collective thinking of society would be far
less efficient than that of a single mind, were it not that a multi-
pHcity of cooperating minds permits a division of mental labor.
This division extends to all phases of the collective mental life.
Society has as its disposal a vast fund of knowledge which it
turns to account through various associations, each of which has
more or less clearly defined aims and within the limits of these
aims a will of its own. That is to say, the various associations
have a range of motives outside of which choice cannot be made
without its prescribed character being violated. But with one
exception, the state, the range of motives is far from being
^ See Baldwin: Social and Ethical Interpretations, ch. vi, Sec. 5. Also Gid-
dings: Principles of Sociology, ed. of 1896. 150 fF.
THE SOCIAL WILL. 23
exhaustive. The social will expressed in the state is free in the
sense that the only limit to the range of motives v^hich actuate
it is its own psychic constitution, and in the further sense that
it is capable of making a rational choice of motives. That the
social will exerts a directive force is unmistakable. The state
has made notable achievement in the domain of education,
industry and politics : and the part which it is destined to play
in the future gives fair promise of being greater than in the past.
Mr. James Bryce puts the matter fairly when he says :
" Modern civilization, in becoming more complex and refined,
has become more exacting. It discerns more benefits which
the organized power o/ government can secure, and grows more
anxious to attain them. Men live fast, and are impatient of the
slow working of natural laws. The triumphs of physical sci-
ence have enlarged their desires for comfort, and have shown
them how many things may be accomplished by the application
of collective skill and large funds which are beyond the reach
of individual effort."^
13. The ends of the state are thus more comprehensive than
those of any other association; while the autonomy of its will
and the indefinite range of its motives give it a unique psychic
character. The state reflects upon its past and plans for remote
future ends. It has one supreme end, the welfare of society,
which it strives to attain through a series of particular volitions,
in which it evaluates, to some degree, its motives according to
the mode in which they modify its character. The voluntary
control exercised by associations within the state is chiefly pru-
dential; the choice of motives being largely made from the
standpoint of interest or advantage. These associations seldom
scrutinize their motives from a moral point of view; such
evaluation as they do make, is limited to those negative cases
in which some question arises as to the prescribed (legal) limits
of their authority. The individual will may be subordinated^'
to a number of partial or group-wills; but as a rule there is one
particular group-will in which this subordination is completest^
This corresponds to the dominant universe of the individual
* American Commonwealth ^ 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 539.
EDWIN ANDREW HATDEN.
mind. But to each social group to which the individual sus-
tains organic relations there is a related universe of desire and
belief, forming a small social world within itself. When the
individual will comes into relation with the total will of society,
the point of contact is in some one of these particular universes;
or, in other words, the contact is not between individuals as
members of society in its entirety, but between individuals as
members of the same or different particular groups. At the
same time the desires and volitions of the various social groups
are subordinated to a still higher psychic unity, the personality
of society.
14. That the concept of a social personality stands for a
reality is evident from a variety of considerations. If we take
an historic survey of the mental life of a people, we invariably
find in the existing fabric of its civilization elements coming
from a remote past. Its religious, moral and political beliefs
have resulted from the combined thought, feeling and action of
many generations. Thus a civilization is a psychic synthesis of
the past experiences of a society. While the civilizations of the
earth have many broad traits in common, yet each has a content
and organization peculiar to itself, forming a genius or tempera-
ment that binds into a delicate unity the most diverse products
of its activity. These differences of national genius are not
things of a day merely, but characterize a nation throughout its
growth and decay. The social mind has a character or dispo-
sition as truly as the individual mind, founded upon certain
fundamental desires and beliefs and correlative modes of action.
They are the elements which give stability to the psychic life
of society. They are of course rooted in the habits of the indi-
vidual personality. A certain way of thinking and acting spreads
through a community; repeated again and again, it becomes
a mechanized process whose unfoldment is more or less indepen-
dent of attention. The mechanization of the original attentive
process has been effected through social discipline, and for this
reason there is an interconnection of individual dispositions in
a wider mechanism which we may fitly term the social disposi-
tion. But these mechanized processes possess something higher
than a merely vital or biological significance, even in the stage
THE SOCIAL WILL. 25
of complete formation, because as Stout remarks, they "may
enter as component parts into a total process which as a whole
is very far from being automatic. The inverse of this is seen in
habits of thinking and willing. Here a comprehensive habitual
tendency realizes itself on special occasions by means of special
processes which are not habitual."^ Hence it is that social habit
is never a closed automatic series functioning independently of
the will, and that custom, the external expression of the social
disposition, never sinks to the level of instinctive control.
15. The extent to which habitual tendencies enter into the
volitional acts of a community varies with the stage of civiliza-
tion. The despotism of custom in the period of primitive cul-
ture is a notorious fact. Habit then forms the chief ingredient
of motives, while at the same time the range of individual
variation in habit is narrow. Contiguous adhesion plays an
important part in the unfoldment of volitional processes. In
this stage of mental development the individual will does not
organize experiences into complex apperceptive systems, and
thus return to modify the social will in a serious way. With the
growth of civilization, the range of variation in habit is increased;
habits are multiplied, but at the same time, as already noted,
they function in processes having a degree of conscious control.
The development of the social will involves at the same time
the differentiation of the individual will; so that in a state of
advanced culture, the individual will functions in some ways
as a tendency more or less complete in itself. Here the indi-
vidual will has certain ends and purposes which are purely
personal, as in particular interests relating to private property.
As a complex social environment requires the readaptation of
volitional processes to new circumstances, some component
parts whose unfoldment was previously more or less automatic,
now demand attention, and in consequence become to some
extent independent volitions, so that in this way a continuous
enlargement as well as particularization of the universe of
motives goes on. The individualization is not to be conceived,
however, as the segregation of some particular will from the
whole social will, but as the infoldment of the social will, out
^ Analytical Psychology, vol. i, p. 262.
26 EDWIN ANDREW HAT DEN,
of which arises a number of reciprocally limiting and partial
wills, externally manifest in the corresponding lives of the social
groups concerned. The extent to which the infoldment modifies
preexisting social habits varies with the different social groups
and with the habits themselves. Some groups retain more than
others the character of the primordial society, while some habits
are but slightly modified in any of the social groups. The
latter are the basis of the national culture, forming the stable
elements of the social personality which enable it to withstand
the profound shocks of political revolutions.
1 6. When the growth of civilization has reached a stage in
I which the individual will is enabled to organize social experi-
ences in a manner peculiar to itself, volitions may then speedily
mature in a single mind and spread to the other minds of the
community. Such volitions are in relation to the entire history
of a culture somewhat ephemeral. They are produced by a
mental activity which, to a considerable extent, operates inde-
pendently ofthe apperceptive control exercised bythe permanent
beliefs of the race. They gain a temporary ascendency owing
to the action of highly special and accidental causes; but they
do not persist for any length of time, not because they lack
cohesion of parts, but because springing up at various parts of
the social medium, they act as mutually inhibiting motives in
the social mind. A general condition which favors the appear-
ance of these transitory beliefs is a skepticism resulting from
the weakening of old beliefs. In a period of social anarchy, the
times are rife, owing to the excited condition ofthe public mind,
with a multitude of beliefs, "which appear first here and then
there, only to disappear, until the advent of some clear formula
or some suitable mechanism which throws all the others into the
background and which serves thenceforward as the fixed basis
for future improvements and developments."^ We have here
an instance of the general law of apperception that when for
any reason the systematic control exercised by any mental sys-
tem is temporarily suspended, the forces of association may
come into play to fill the mind with a multitude of disconnected
ideas until some new system supervenes. These unstable beliefs
*Tarde: op. cit.y p. 14F.
THE SOCIAL WILL. 27
function as more or less independent units. If they have strong
affective components, they act with great vigor and energy,
and thus set going external events that destroy the condition of
their existence. They are thus Hkely to pass into action at once
though a long course of action is out of the question. We have
a record of their work in the violent, turbulent periods of history.
But extreme mobility of opinion is possible only as the terminal
phase in the mental evolution of a people, in which the founda-
tions for a civilization and a national culture have been laid
in the ground-work of a few fixed beliefs.
CHAPTER III.
THE SYSTEMATIZATION OF BELIEF.
I. In the early history of the social mind the apperceptive
control is relatively simple, association or contiguous adhesion
being the chief form of the interconnection of psychic processes.
The lax interdependence of associative systems makes it possible
for somewhat contradictory beliefs to be held. The absence of
unifying principles of experience permits an indefinite extension
of associative systems through mere accretion; so that v^e find
in the history of the human mind a period whose most salient
feature is the accumulation rather than the systematization of
belief. There is, however, an evident limit to the extension of
belief, notwithstanding a freedom from apperceptive restraint,
viz., the uninventiveness of the primitive mind. There is too
much solidarity of the individual and social will in the early
stages of civilization for the former to elaborate social experi-
ences in a fashion peculiar to itself; but the very conditions
which free the individual will at the same time extend the sphere
of apperceptive control. The creations of the developed indi-
vidual will are notably more numerous and at the same time
more coherent than those of the primitive will. Early inventions
are largely modifications of memory contents; later inventions
are a combination of the elements of experience under the
motive of a purpose or end. The latter involve a more detailed
analysis of experience and a more comprehensive and systematic
synthesis of its elements.
2. (a) The mental systems into which historic experiences
are organized, are never in the social consciousness in their
fullness at one time. A system is able to exert an influence on
the stream of consciousness without the necessity of its parts
being explicit, i. e., it may act as a total tendency from the fact
that there is a common trend in all its parts. Much of the social
control existing before the collective mind has reached a high
THE SOCIAL WILL. 29
degree of self-consciousness, is in mental systems, the funda-
mental unities of which in the ordinary run of things remain
largely implicit. But when new conditions confront society,
the likelihood exists that the various parts of a mental system
are not excited with equal force owing to the unusual modes of
stimulation, and as a result some, perhaps all, of the parts become
explicit. Times of profound political 'disturbances are preemi-
nently the periods in the history of a nation when social dispo-
sitions are unfolded through the excitation of their components.
The unfoldment may at times be violent, but even then the
fundamental beliefs of the race come in to give a more or less
definite trend to the outburst.
2. {h) The systematization of belief means in its individual
aspect the specialization of the universe of intercourse. As the
interaction of mental systems becomes more definite in the indi-
vidual mind, so the interaction of individual minds becomes cor-
respondingly more controlled. The fundamental systems into
which social experience becomes in the course of time organized,
display certain special tendencies which they did not have in
earlier times, although they remain interconnected in the gen-
eral mental fabric of the civilization. Thus in the modern
secular state, we find changes in political ideas spreading
through society without involving to any serious extent the
religious beliefs; while in the old Hebrew theocracy, religious
ideas were so closely interwoven with political, that the utter-
ances of the prophets as the acknowledged oracles of God,
seriously modified at times the affairs of state. To each of these
fundamental systems of belief corresponds a conative tendency
of the social will. The transference of an idea or mental element
from one mental system to another frequently occurs in the
history of a culture. Men's views of the world and life change:
which means not so much that the facts of common experience
are different as that the mental systems into which they are
incorporated are different. But a belief cannot function in two
distinct mental systems at the same time. The aesthetic attitude
toward an impression is incompatible at the time of its existence
with the scientific. Social beliefs are coordinated through their
interconnection in the social personality; but when this coordi-
30 EDWIN ANDREW HATDEN.
nation is disturbed, the ascendency and isolated action of one
system ensues. Under such circumstances the belief is likely
to incite acts which the interconnection of the belief had pre-
viously inhibited. In this way social indignation acting inde-
pendent of legal sentiment may result in the avenging of wrong
through mob-violence; so, too, religious zeal, freed from other
social emotions, may result in a fanaticism that counts its
victims by the score. On the other hand the union of indepen-
dent systems restricts each in a manner corresponding with the
principle of combination, as we see in the modification of the
political ideas and institutions of a state when it is united with
others in an empire.
3. There are two widely contrasted types of mental sys-
tems. In one the unfoldment depends upon contiguous adhe-
sion, i. e., a given fact emerges into consciousness largely through
its dependence upon the immediately preceding facts. In the
other there is a central principle of control : a part emerges not
because of its relation to the preceding part alone, but to all
other parts of the system as well. Where there is such solidar-
ity in the interaction of the individual wills that any one of
them but slightly changes the collective activity, such changes
as do occur in the social mind are largely associative. Associa-
tional changes stretch over psychic processes ranging from
sense-perceptions to the interconnection of mental objects in a
temporal process. Modification of sense perceptions have an
indirect interest to the social psychologist in the fact that the
sensory product may be combined along with other ideas through
memory in a belief. Thus illusions acquire special significance
if they become incorporated in a mythological system. Of direct
importance are the changes occurring in a temporal succession
of ideas. One of the factors at work is the natural efFacement
which mental objects undergo through the failure of memory.
Details are forgotten, only certain features remaining permanent
mental possessions. The permanence of an impression depends
not only upon certain qualities of its own, but upon a group of
highly variable subjective conditions. As a result there is an
uneven fading in the contents of a memory process, with the
result that reproduction is always an imperfect reinstatement
THE SOCIAL WILL. 3 1
of the experience. An associative system may thus break up
passively through internal dissolution into its component parts,
v^hich then become attached again through association to other
systems. A similar phenomenon is observed in the social mind.
Distinct streams of thought become confluent in the course of
history when the circumstances of their origin are forgotten.
A striking historic personality serves as a center of attraction for
myths and legends derived from independent sources. Another
source of unconscious modification is found in the role which
associative systems frequently play in being parts of a more
comprehensive system which as a whole is apperceptive. We
may take in illustration of this what Wundt calls "the change
of purpose in custom."^ Speaking of the funeral feast he says:
"In its earliest form the funeral feast is a sacrificial feast.
Primitive man offers sacrifices to the gods at every important
occasion of his life, and will certainly make an offering at the
burial of a kinsman. In part he desires to obtain the divine
favor for his dead, but in part — and this is probably the more
ancient idea of the two — the dead man is himself an object of
worship. ... A second motive, which came into oper-
ation at a later date, but may gradually have ousted the original
worship of the dead, lies in the symbolic meaning of a feast
eaten in common. The common enjoyment of meat and drink
is for primitive man a religious symbol of brotherhood; more
especially if the feast have anything of solemnity about it, if it
be sanctioned, so to speak, by the presence of the gods.
It is this final form of the funeral feast whose traces have been
longest preserved. With its passage from a sensible to a sym-
bolic meaning it has gradually lost its religious reference. The
funeral feast, that is, becomes simply a commemorative feast,
at which mention is made in conversation and discourse of the
virtues of the dead." The changes in the feelings and ideas
which were associated with the given custom are unintentional
modifications brought about by the confluence of mental sys-
tems. The funeral feast and the commemorative feast were alike
in this respect, that in both there was the enjoyment of meat
and drink in common; and in consequence of this likeness it
^ Ethicsy vol. i, p. 139 ff.
32 EDWIN ANDREW HAYDEN.
was but natural that the funeral feast should attract to itself
the feelings and sentiments associated with the commemorative
feast.
4. In apperception the changes produced in consciousness
take place in a state of attention according to some motive
which controls and preconditions the change. Society adjusts
itself to new conditions by the conscious adaptation of old stores
of knowledge. The adaptation is generally effected first at one
center and then spreads throughout the social medium. Social
theory which finds in the interaction of individual minds the
essential phenomena of hypnotism only, is inclined to draw a
radical distinction between the mental processes going on at the
social center where the adaptation is first effected and the men-
tal processes going on at the centers which repeat this adapta-
tion. The first have been dignified by the name of invention
while the latter have been forced to acknowledge the impeach-
ment of mediocrity in the name of imitation. Now the dis-
tinction is of profound importance for a theory of social progress
which is directly concerned with mental products, but is of less
importance for social psychology, which aims to study the
interconnection of individual mental processes in collective men-
tal processes. Invention marks the termination of an apper-
ceptive process in which a determinate psychic compound,
image or conception is produced. In imitation an image is
communicated to the mind in a more or less completed form.
Through whatever medium the communication occurs we have
contiguous association between the verbal symbols and mental
systems, by means of which certain mental systems are brought
into conjunction that would have forever remained isolated in
that particular mind. In this way association can be of material
assistance in producing favorable conditions for an apperceptive
action between two mental systems: but its action can extend
to nothing beyond bringing the two systems together in con-
sciousness, and exciting the partial system upon which apper-
ceptive interaction depends. If the mental systems are relatively
simple, the apperception is of the ordinary degree of complexity;
so that to superficial observation nothing seems to be involved
beyond the mere lodgment of a communicated idea in the par-
THE SOCIAL WILL. 33
ticular mind. Now in invention the same two features of asso-
ciation and apperception are at work, though not in the same
relative proportion. In invention the conjunction of mental
systems is less externally determined by social suggestion, while
the interaction is likely to be more prolonged and persistent.
Invention implies more comprehensive mental systems and more
sustained attentional control. But there is no case of invention
in which social contact, or what this amounts to, psychologically
speaking, viz, association, has not played an important part.
The history of the theory of natural selection sheds considerable
light upon the psychology of invention. I take the following
short account from Morgan '} "Charles Darwin and Dr. Alfred
Russell Wallace both reached the conception of Natural Selec-
tion on reading Malthus*s work on Population. Both had
acquired a system of knowledge concerning the relationships of
animals and plants. In both the net results were constantly in
mind. As they ranged in thought over the system, now one
and now another factor was in the focus of attention, with a
rearrangement of the other factors around it. They read
Malthus. Unless some factor in the Malthusian universe of
discourse coincided or was congruous with some factor in the
universe of biological thought, the two could not come into fruit-
ful relation. But there was a mediating factor common to both
— over-production of offspring. There were other features
sufficiently congruent to enable the Malthusian discussion to
throw light on the problems of biology. Hence arose the
suggestion ... of Natural Selection through the elimi-
nation of the unfit.'' Here social suggestion communicated
to the minds of the two distinguished naturalists a mental system,
which was combined in an apperceptive way with the systems
of biologic relationships already formed, into a more compre-
hensive system the fundamental unity of which was the concept
of natural selection. But the same mental processes are involved
in the humbler achievements of everyday life.
5. Owing to the interconnection of individual wills in a
wider volitional process, it happens that a change, originating
in an individual mind, spreads through the social medium in
^ Psychology for Teachers, p. 87, new ed.
34 EDWIN ANDREW HATDEN.
some determinate fashion. A change in a given mental system
spreads to other mental systems in the order of the degree of
relatedness of the latter to the former. In so far as the mental
systems are more thoroughly organized in the minds of respec-
tively different social groups, we have, corresponding to the
order of psychic excitation, an order in the modification of the
^life of social groups. Social changes begin as changes in the
idesires and beliefs of a certain group, followed by like mental
changes in the groups whose interests are most closely identified
with those of the first. But to the extent that other desires and
beliefs happen at the time to be ascendant in the minds of the
other social groups, the disturbance originating in the mind of
the first group meets a corresponding resistance to its spread.
The excitation is in its earlier stages of a general nature and
becomes more specific as the infoldment proceeds. Accordingly
we find deep social changes beginning as vague mental tenden-
cies, which are nothing more than feelings of unrest and dis-
satisfaction with some existing institution, and which continue
for some time in this merely negative attitude of protest. Later
a plan emerges that seeks to remove the cause of dissatisfaction
by substituting some other arrangement that will realize the
needs in this direction in a better manner. The plan becomes
a motive to a series of volitions that may have profound and
revolutionary changes as a consequence. The earlier phases
of such social movements involve the excitation of some universe
of belief in its entirety, with a corresponding indefiniteness in
the reaction of the social will. The component systems of the
particular universe are all equally aroused, so that none of them
can become appercipient in preference to another; but later on
one of these gains some ascendency, and events now take a
definite turn, owing to the resulting univocal nature of the
motives to social volition. The period of incubation of a social
movement is thus one in which component mental systems of
some universe of beliefs are struggling each against the other
to become explicit in the public mind. The issue depends upon
a variety of conditions, which lie partly in the mode or cir-
cumstances of stimulation and partly in the nature of the
mental system itself.
THE SOCIAL WILL.
35
6. The recency of its activity conditions the ascendancy of
a mental system. A system out of use is undergoing continual
decay. Soon the parts begin to function independent of each
other, and to restore the system to its former degree of efficiency
requires a process of recollection that is discursive in a degree
proportionate to the time during which the system has been
dormant. A mental system that has been in recent action may
function more efficiently than one v^hich has been out of use for
some time although, in the event of continued disuse, it would
soon fall into a greater degree of incoherence than the later
system. Besides reproduction of an incoherent system gener-
ally brings in through association irrelevant ideas that delay
the apperceptive activity of the system. At times these are
incorporated within the system, as already noted in the case
where memory images become changed into images of the imag-
ination. An interesting example of how recency conditions
the efficiency of a mental system is given in the memory of the
late seismic disturbances. The news of the South American
earthquake brought to mind in even considerable detail, the
facts of the California disturbance, but only vaguely those of
the Charleston.
7. Intensity and vividness of the elements of a mental sys-
tem are important conditions of its strength. It is chiefly on
account of the intensity and vividness of its elements that the
world of sensible experience is taken to be the ultimate universe
of reality and that the creations of fancy never command belief
until they find lodgment in the memory series. Intense and
vivid experiences such as are incident to political revolutions
are more deeply engraved on the social memory, although the
latter have been repeated many times. Ihering advances the
proposition, in opposition to the Savigny-Puchta theory, that
all great legal principles have been established by what he calls
the "struggle for right." Undoubtedly the intensity of the
experiences incident to a struggle in which some legal principle
is born, is an important factor in helping to maintain the asser-
tion of the right involved, before it has crystaUized into a social
sentiment. Le Bon has well described the eflFect which startHng
events produce on the public mind: "A hundred petty crimes
36 EDWIN ANDREW HATDEN.
or petty accidents will not strike the imagination of crowds in
the least, whereas a single great crime or a single great accident will
profoundly impress them, even though the results be infinitely
less disastrous than those of the hundred small accidents put
together. . . . The probable loss of a transatlantic
steamer that was supposed, in the absence of news, to have gone
down in mid-ocean, profoundly impressed the imagination of a
crowd for a whole week. Yet official statistics show that 850
sailing vessels and 203 steamers were lost in the year 1894 alone.
The crowd was never for a moment concerned with these suc-
cessive losses, much more important though they were as far
as regards the destruction of life and property, than the loss of
the Atlantic liner in question could possibly have been."^
8. The support which a mental system can command from
the other systems with which it is connected, is of material
assistance in the maintenance of its ascendency. Now we have
already seen how association may bring into relation two mental
systems that might otherwise remain disconnected; and if such
conjunction occurs when the mind is especially active, the two
will probably unite in a more comprehensive system whose
total energy is greater than that of either. Under such condi-
tions a given mental system, with its associate, in their joint
activity, can effectually oust from consciousness another system,
although considered in itself it may have less inner stability
than its rival. What is called the social opportuneness of an
idea or invention, depends upon such associative conjunction.
An idea that is harmonious with the general set of the public
mind, rallies to its support a whole mental array, while another
idea, equally meritorious but lacking such support, fails to
command general attention. Not that the mental systems are
wanting which under other circumstances would yield the latter
support, but that for the time being, they are prevented from
acting. With a change of ideas in the public mind, the defeated
invention may later gain a speedy acceptance. The great
leaders of mankind have well understood these facts, and before
trying to put their plans into execution, have either waited till
times became ripe through the natural course of events, or have
^ LeBon, The Crowd^ pp. 78-79, London, 1900.
THE SOCIAL WILL. 37
sought by direct instruction to develop in the public mind,
mental systems that would support their plans.
9. The most important factor in institutional heredity is
none of those above discussed, but another, viz, repetition —
unceasing repetition with, of course, full command of attention.
The groundwork of a civilization is a few fixed beliefs which
have been thoroughly wrought into the mental constitution of
a people by incessant repetition. The stress which has been laid
upon imitation as one of the most fundamental facts of social
life, does but enforce in particular words the importance of
repetition in giving stability to the ideas, concepts and beliefs
of a race. Society maintains a vast disciplinary agency whose)
sole purpose is to instill into the minds of the young the funda-
mental facts and values of its culture as data upon which imme-
diate action is demanded. In this routine of the common, oft-
repeated experiences, lies all that is most vital to the welfare of
a people. Art has largely drawn its themes from the realms of
common experience and in this fact lies its suggestiveness.
The experiences repeated from the earliest years of childhood,
organize into mental systems that require a minimum of stimu-
lation to arouse them; they form a delicate consensus in the
way of a sensitivity to the genius of one's civilization which a
foreigner never fully acquires.
10. The degree to which feelings of relationship interpene-
trate a mental system, has much to do indetermining its strength.
In a highly organized system, each part reflects and supports
the other; so that one part is never in the focus of attention
without there being an excitation to some extent of the others.
Owing to the reciprocal action going on between the parts, the
system is kept from dissolving and in readiness to function as
a unit. A series held together by mere contiguous adhesion
has no more strength as a total system than the weakest bond
existing between any two members; nor does the increase in
strength in the connection between any two members improve
that between the others. On the other hand, in a system which
is a manifold of numerous relations, it is impossible to modify the
connection of any two parts without involving the others to an
extent proportionate to the number of inner relations. The
38 EDWIN ANDREW HATDEN.
best examples of these systems are those expressing quantita-
tive relations as mathematical demonstrations, mathematical
theories of physical phenomena, etc. The theories of mathe-
matical physics may fall or stand with a single fact, there being
at times a delicate dependence upon quantitative relations
within very small limits of error. The corpuscular theory of
light gives an admirable general explanation of refraction, but
fails when quantitative relations (the index of refraction), are
taken into account.
II. In general we may divide mental systems into two dis-
tinct classes so far as their cognitive elements are concerned,
the group of perceptual data constituting the so-called Tacts'
of a science, and the system of concepts by means of which the
mind apprehends the facts. The concepts are in reality the
laws or principles of the particular science. Now the progress
of science means not only the multiplication and more exact
determination of perceptual data, but the extension and deeper
organization of theory as well. While the theories of a science
are conditioned by its data, theory returns to condition the
discovery of new facts; for as science develops, the discovery
of new data is less a matter of accident, and more a matter of
rational procedure based upon existing knowledge. Notwith-
standing the intimate relation between fact and theory, their
elaboration represents partially independent historic movements:
that is to say, the accumulation of facts may go on for a consid-
erable length of time before any need of the revision of hypothe-
sis or theory is felt, just as a further improvement of a theory
is possible with reference to the sphere of existing fact. Both
the sphere of fact and theory become more coherent with the
progress of science. A fact before it is admitted as a datum
in the body of existing knowledge must be repeatedly verified;
while a theory before it can gain an ascendancy, must submit
to critical experimentation devised for the specific purpose of
testing the theory.
12. Conceptual systems are not however limited to branches
of knowledge with which the idea of science is especially con-
nected. We find the great fund of social knowledge, religious,
political, economic, arranged in more or less articulate schemes.
THE SOCIAL WILL. 39
based upon some principle or concept. Experience combines
into systematic totals long before the plan of combination
becomes explicit in the public mind. In such cases the uni-
versal elements of experience do not exist apart from the
concrete totals whose plan of combination they determine.
What is termed practical sagacity or wisdom consists of mental
systems organized in this way. Later the universal elements
are disengaged from their concrete embodiments and are explic-
itly stated in rules. We find for instance in the universality
of custom the operation of general factors or tendencies but
dimly comprehended, which emerge later in special moral
precepts of the practical understanding and again in more
fundamental principles of ethical science in the way of certain
norms. In the sphere of industrial activities, at times new
practices spread through the social medium by the imita-
tion of a particular model, and in this way certain general fac-
tors are at work, causing concrete elements to combine into
similar wholes. Later these universal factors become explicit in a
new concept as in the caseof the capital concept in modern times.
While the multipHcation of concrete social acts goes on with the
growth of civilization and the increase of population, the num-
ber of distinct universal principles serving for the organization
of experience, does not exceed a certain small number. This
universaHzing activity of the mind corresponds to what is, objec-
tively considered, the discovery of laws of greater generality.
In truth, within any sphere of fact already a matter of social
acquisition, the growth of culture means the replacing through
combination and substitution of empirical formulae by a smaller
number of laws possessing a correspondingly higher generality.
Progress in the evolution of conceptual systems is partly a
matter of combination and partly a matter of substitution.
Many theories which have appeared in the history of science
are mutually exclusive; others have resulted from the synthesis
of empirical generalizations that have covered partial phases of
a group of phenomena; still others have resulted from a more
precise quantitative statement or detailed application of an idea
already developed in its general features. The later part of the
history of events that led up to the discovery of the Newtonian
40 EDWIN ANDREW HATDEN.
theory of gravitation well illustrates the progress of generaliza-
tion through the combination of preceding hypotheses; while
progress through substitution is seen in the replacement of the
corpuscular theory by the wave theory of light. Substitution
then occurs in the case of theories covering the same range of
phenomena; combination occurs where theories formulating the
order in the component parts of a system, are united in one
more general theory valid for the whole system.
13. Conceptual systems comprehending special determina-
tions and having numerous inter-relations, are difficult to dis-
place for the reason that the mutual excitation of parts multi-
plies the amount of mental energy available at any particular
/moment. But too high articulateness is at times a source of
weakness. No theory ever does full justice to the facts, which
must be pruned here and expanded there to fit into the ideal
limits of a formula. It thus may happen that a theory is expressed
with too much mathematical exactness, and gains so great an
ascendancy over the mind because of its logical symmetry
that really significant facts are ignored or transformed by such
prepossession. The mental system, because of its completeness
resists modification, and like a group of physical particles under
high internal stress may fly to pieces when exposed to the re-
peated shocks which the progress of discovery causes. A lower
degree of articulateness at times insures a higher degree of
of vitality, because room is aflForded for growth and expansion.
Nothing enforces this point better than the inductive philosophy
associated with the name of Darwin. Stated with circumspec-
tion and a manifest desire to do full justice to all the facts con-
cerned, it never aimed at finalities but only tendencies highly
probable, with the result that it has quietly assimilated the
facts gathered in so many lines during the last half-century. So,
too, in Roman and English law, we have two instances of legal
systems whose universal fitness for defining the rights of man,
has been due in a considerable measure to the absence of a
certain degree of logical refinement.
14. The spread of an idea through the social medium is
ichecked by indiff^erence or opposition. Where there is lacking
|the mental system with which an idea has some points in con-
THE SOCIAL WILL. 4 1
tact, it fails to command the attention. Scientific conceptions
which formulate highly specialized experience, do not enjoy a
currency beyond a small social group, for the reason that in the
minds of the generality, the mental systems are wanting which
can incorporate the idea. Owing to the superficial contact the
mental processes aroused by the idea are very transitory. In
the case of opposition, however, the idea stimulates the mind
to vigorous action, in calling forth mental systems which have
elements that resist the incorporation of the belief into the
context of social thought. The various conditions affecting the
stability of social groups are so numerous and in their joint
action so complex that we find as a matter of history that very
few beliefs are uniformly organized in the individual minds of
society, but rather that corresponding to the external division
of labor in social activity, there is an internal division of thought
and feeling, making the social mind a complex of different com-
ponent mental systems. As a result an idea encounters in its
spread through the social medium a resistance varying with!
the stability of the social groups which antagonize it. In all
minds some struggle goes on before the idea is assimilated: in
some the assimilation is comparatively speedy; in others some-'
what tardy. If the mental conflict terminates in each mind in
practically the same way, in the incorporation or rejection of
the idea, the struggle has been an individual affair. The trans-
mission of an idea under these circumstances is like the onward
movement of a wave in a homogeneous medium : as the wave
retains throughout the same form, so each mind repeats the
apperceptive activity. What we have here is the repetition of
an individual process forming a total process of nearly identical
parts. The total process corresponds to an aggregate idea of
the individual mind. It is only in rare cases, however, that
the transformation of social belief is accomplished by the quiet
spread of an idea from one individual mind to another. Such
peaceful solution occurs only with matters of obvious utility,
where sentiment, habit and prejudice are of minor importance.
Conflicts involving beliefs deeply rooted in social history, which
because of their fitness to express the fundamental needs of
humanity, have strong affective components, are of a more
42 EDWIN ANDREW HATDEN.
bitter and violent nature. In proportion as an idea involves
emotional interests, it is destined to encounter somewhere in its
course firm and obstinate resistance. As soon as there is a divi-
sion in society between those who oppose the idea and those
who affirm it, the seat of conflict has passed from the individual
to the social mind. In the minds of one party to the conflict
the idea has been incorporated into the dominant universe of
belief; in the minds of the other, the idea has aroused an antago-
nistic mental system. Now mental conflicts of a social nature
I may be settled in either of two ways : by discussion or by force.
Solution by discussion occurs under a variety of forms, depend-
ing in part upon the particular nature of the conflict or opposi-
tion. The opposition may arise from ignorance. In this case
the mental systems which can assimilate the idea, are wanting
or imperfectly formed. The idea is suflEiciently grasped to touch
some universe of belief, but owing to its vagueness it discharges
no further function than arousing and keeping ascendant the
particular belief. If the belief has strong affective components
it leads to practical endeavors that resist the spread of the idea.
The removal of the conflict is a matter of education. The
idea must be presented as a mental system in the process of
unfoldment, like a scientific exposition or judicial opinion, —
not as a total : for the component parts, representing a less com-
plex mental synthesis than the whole idea, are more readily
assimilated, and their interconnection in a belief follows, once
they are firmly established. The mental systems on which the
assimilation of the idea depends vary all the way from mere
aggregates of general experience to organic combination of
concepts in still higher universals.
15. The conflict may arise from the indeterminateness of
the mental systems engaged, as between two rival theories that
derive equal support from the rather meager data. The dis-
covery of some pertinent fact puts an end to the struggle by
suppressing one theory and confirming the other. Such contests
are not likely to be spirited in an age of speculative caution
when the scientific ideal of suspended judgment on matters not
yet adequately investigated is being realized, though in the
early history of science, when superstition formed the staple of
^ OF THE \
UNIVERSITY )
OF J
TB.E SOCIAL WILL. 43
its pretences, disputation rather than investigation was the
rule.
Other conflicts occur between mental systems through their
connection with other systems which are antagonistic. The
conflicts of moral precepts in particular cases are frequently of
this sort. Moral conviction, for instance, may lead to refusal
of a gift of money intended for some worthy end, if it comes
from a fortune dishonestly accumulated. There is no conflict
of a moral nature between the desire to use money for a worthy
end and the desire to be honest. The conflict in the present
instance arises from the peculiar concrete circumstances under
which the two desires are conjoined. The removal of the con-
flict in a way that suppresses neither desire, is by setting them
free from this particular conjunction and uniting them again as
parts of other concrete systems.
16. Free discussion, however, is a mode of solution success-
ful with only a portion of the public issues. Disputes which
involve matters deeply connected with social welfare, are sub-
ject to legal control, being decided by a body constituted for that?
purpose. The psychology of prestige and obedience explains
the mental processes leading to the solution of these conflicts.
Lastly the conflict may attain such a degree of intensity through
the feehng engendered that a peaceful solution is impossible
and nothing short of an armed struggle can remove the division in
the public mind. We have here the intrusion of a physical factor
in the domain of psychological causation. The victorious idea
in this more than in the preceding case gains an ascendancy
through external constraint; and though not becoming an integ-
ral part of the mental life of the defeated party, does yet secure
an outward conformity. The opinions and sentiments which
only violence could suppress, are still secretly cherished; but
they weaken as time changes the outward conformity into
second nature. The consciousness of force owes its strength
to the objective circumstances of its excitation : it does not rep-
resent an apperceptive synthesis, and hence does not reflect the
inner constitution of the personality.
17. {a) A conflict of any social importance marks a stage]
in the collective mental life clearly separated from what precedes '
44 EDWIN ANDREW HATDEN.
and from what follows. In its external aspects, it forms a
turning point in the history of nations. Even when the idea
fails to be incorporated in the minds of one party to the conflict,
society being reconciled to a permanent division of opinion, the
conflict has not left the mental systems in the minds of that
party in their former condition, for the points of contrariety
have been emphasized and rendered more suggestible. In sub-
sequent issues in which this belief is again concerned, either
by itself or as a part of a more comprehensive movement, the
heightened suggestibility of the points of conflict is destined to
play a part in the trend of social thought.
1 7. (b) A conflict causes social thought to return upon itself.
Without some object to arrest the flow of thought, mental life
would move on under the inhibitions and reinforcements com-
ing from the play of the forces of association. Opposition
causes a backward movement of the social mind to the earlier
phases of the struggle; and on this follow mental processes work-
ing toward a removal of the conflict, either in the way of the
repetition of the mental history of the conflict, or along lines
outside of the historic development of the conflict. Much more
in the social than in the individual mind is a mental conflict
likely to extend to related mental systems; so that along with
the fundamental issue usually go many collateral ones.
18. At times the deadlock in the social mind is relieved as
noted above, not by an apperceptive activity, but by a modera-
tion of the ardor of the strife, which permits a division of public
opinion on the matter at issue. What differences of opinion
are tolerated, depends upon what society regards as essential to
its welfare. A theocracy punishes blasphemy as the gravest
of oflTenses, because it feels the religious faith of its people to
be the strongest social bond. Intolerance arises from the ascend-
ancy of an idea which has considerable internal strength but
which is under no systematic control through an interconnec-
tion with other ideas in a more comprehensive mental process.
Not until the idea encounters resistance so that its immediate
command of the will is checked, does the intolerance abate to
any extent. Mental conflict raises the status of an idea above
that of a mere impulse to action, by bringing it into connection
THE SOCIAL WILL. 45
with Other ideas, and thus marks the beginning of rational,
apperceptive control. Then the mental changes are manifest
on the social side in the weakening of the authority of custom.
" As far as it goes, the mere putting up ofa subject to discussion, . . .
is a clear admission that that subject is in no degree settled by
established rule, and that men are free to choose in it. It is an
admission too that there is no sacred authority — no one trans-
cendent and divinely appointed man whom in that matter the com-
munity is bound to obey."*
19. In mental conflict the mind becomes aware of its own
activity. In customs and usages are embodied unities of expe-
rience which the social mind does not clearly apprehend, though
they exert a control on social thought through the felt similarity
of one individual case to another. When some particular cir-
cumstance arises which because of its novelty, does not readily
assimilate with existing customs or usages, mental conflict
ensues, resulting in the synthesis of concrete social experiences
into higher systems. It is here that emerge the general princi-
ples of experiences, moral, political, religious and utilitarian.
Now there are certain general limitations connected with
apperceptive action that should be noted. History is irrevers-
ible. It is absolutely impossible to restore any past social
epoch. The outward arrangements and appointments may be
much the same, but the inner sentiments and feelings which
clustered around the old regime, and which are the really vital ele-
ments, are gone forever. The experiences which have come
with the intervening years, have produced a new background
in the social mind.
20. Sentiments and ideas which express what is distinctive (
in the mental life of a people, cannot be bodily transferred from
one culture to another. They must be transfigured into har-
mony with the national genius, if they are to be anything more \
than floating ideas or mere facts of memory. Hence a belief \
which represents a long social growth, cannot be assimilated by '
a foreign civilization in its subtler and more transitive phases.
Scientific and mathematical conceptions are the least subject to
national limitations, for the reason that they relate to a domain
* Bagehot, Physics and Politics , p. 161.
46 EDWIN ANDREW HAY DEN.
of experience which is apprehended by the least variable of
human faculties, that of sensible cognition; but the delicate
sentiments of social life which find their most adequate expres-
sion in the great works of poetic genius, are in a considerable
degree the exclusive property of the particular culture.
CHAPTER IV.
THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF MORAL RIGHT.
I. The interaction of individual minds takes place with
varying degrees of intimacy in relation to the self. As already
pointed out, experience organizes in the individual personality
into tv^o v^ridely contrasted universes, the physical or impersonal
and the social or personal. The feelings which in concrete men-
tal experience, are attached to these two universes, differ widely
in their nature. The attitude of the self toward experience
regarded in the mere light of fact, is one of disinterestedness.
All facts then stand upon the same level so far as their value for
the self is concerned : and if the self does exercise any selective
preference, it is on account of the feeling which arises from the
relation of one fact to another as members of a conceptual sys-
tem. We have examples of these impersonal feelings of rela-
tionship in the feeling of harmony which arises when some
conception dawns upon the mind that injects order and system
into a mass of disconnected facts; in the feeling of scientific
curiosity which impels the mind to seek further knowledge along
some particular line, as well as in the feeling of wonder in the
presence of something that contravenes the usual order of expe-
rience. The two attitudes are mutually exclusive, though alter-
nation between them, at times even somewhat rapid, is in the
general run of things possible.
2. When in the contact of one mind with another the point
of orientation in the universe of intercourse lies almost exclu-
sively within some cognitive system, the consciousness of self
both in the way of idea and feeHng, shrinks to a minimum. As
the collective mental activity moves within the domain of proc-
esses of knowledge, ideas and feelings of relationship form the
content of the psychic material communicated. The plane of
communication may vary all the way from the bare excitation
of mental images up to elaborate interaction of conceptual sys-
48 EDWIN ANDREW HATDEN.
terns. In these cases the mental contact is at points on the
universal side of experience, sharable by all individual minds.
But even here that particular center of mental energy v^hich we
call the self is to some extent excited, since the impersonal
feelings which color the given ideational processes, represent
the reaction of the self as a totality, without involving an unfold-
ment of its parts. If under conditions of mental conflict an
unfoldment of the parts of the mental system which constitutes
the self becomes necessary, self-consciousness becomes explicit :
the idea of self in its relation to other selves together with the
various related feelings, comes into full view. Moral situations
in particular are favorable to the evolution of the consciousness
of self.
3. So long as mental life is such as arises in connection with
responses to present stimulation, it stands on a plane of organi-
zation no higher than that of animal want; mental changes are
then merely an incident in the mutations of experience resulting
from variations in the objective order itself. When, however
the reinstatement of former experience is possible from central
excitation, under any form that will lead to the same practical
result as did the original sense stimulation, animal want is pass-
ing into a higher mental organization of desire. And later
desire becomes still farther removed from immediate practical
volition when the reflective analysis of experience and the com-
bination of the resulting elements into products similar to per-
ceptual realities, take place. Desire then arises in connection
with ideal universes. Many of these universes remain merely
floating systems of the mind, in more or less complete detach-
ment from a group of habits necessary to volition; others are
brought into intimate relation with the will, and come thus to
exert a direct influence on the turn which the pursuit of practical
ends is likely to take. Now among these ideal universes is one
of particular importance in the change which brings in the
relation of the self to others : viz, that universe in which some
type of personality is imagined and desired. The self is here
viewed with respect to its inner organization, as composed of
certain dominant desires and motives in partial abstraction of
the external conditions which surround the self, whether these
THE SOCIAL WILL. 49
circumstances are a matter of hereditary accident or produced
by the will of the individual himself. It is not meant by this
that the self sets the circumstances of its volitions over against
itself as a mechanical opposite, but rather that it sees ramifying
through the material changes which its volitions effect, a certain
type of personality, the actual or realized self. If some other
type of personality is preferred to that which the practical
activities of the self reveal, to that which is really immanent in
volition, a division exists in the personality on account of the
presence of an unsatisfied desire in the form of an ethical ideal.
Moral progress consists in the successive incorporation of such
ideals into the universe of practical desire as they arise in the!
course of individual development. In other words, the mental
universe in which some type of the self is imagined, must, in
order to be an ethical ideal, command that practical assent of the
mind which has already been discussed under the title of belief.
4. The universe of the ideal self is social in the sense that it
does not contemplate an isolated self, but a self united by defi-
nite ties to other like personalities — ties which reflect very
clearly the relations obtaining in the existing social order. The
extent, however, to which the ideal universe is likely to deviate
from the actual social world, varies considerably in the historyl
of culture. Where there is great solidarity of the individual and
the social will — ^where, in other words, the mental life of society
is made up largely of processes of association, the deviation is
slight. The social will constrains the individual will into a
narrow conformity to a type, since individual and social aims
are not clearly distinguished. The moral character consists
largely of certain fixed habits of thought and action with their
related feelings, being thus a will developed out of responses
to concrete moral situations in which personal example has
served largely as the guide. The morality of such an age is not
a morality of reflection that comprehends broad humanitarian
ends: it is tribal and sectional, yet withal a mechanism that
responds with wonderful delicacy to the demands of that par-
ticular social life, serving besides as the indispensable basis of
further moral growth. When the individual will comes to func-
tion in some degree as an independent volitional process, as it
50 EDWIN ANDREW HAT DEN.
does with the appearance of imagination, understanding and
reason, the universe of self-consciousness, as already noted,
includes as one of its ideational elements, the conception of an
ideal self. To the extent that this representation is an integral
part of that universe: that is, to the extent that it receives the
support of self-feeling and its affiliated mechanism of well-
formed habits, does it become a force in the transformation of
social life. Conduct is then motived by an end more or less
clearly conceived, which serves as a unifying principle of mental
life — unifying not merely in the logical sense of securing con-
sistency within some group of ideas or concepts, but in the far
deeper psychological sense of permanently satisfying the most
urgent and fundamental desires of man. The moral conscious-
ness at this stage of its development presupposes a complex
social life in which there is considerable multiformity of experi-
ence. Out of a reflective analysis of the complex social expe-
rience, through which the individual is enabled to apprehend
the universal elements of his civilization, grows the ideal self —
ideal, and yet imagined as achieving its career under the
special historic conditions of the social order in which the indi-
vidual exists. The ideal self has, however, become a far more
complex and fluid creation than was its predecessor of primi-
tive times.
5. The social universe, actual and ideal, within which the
realized and ideal self exists — the realized self in the practical
conations of the mind and the ideal self in the imaginary uni-
verse of unsatisfied social desires — is the universe of moral
consciousness. The ideational content of this universe is not
its distinguishing trait although the general proposition is
true that the ultimate psychologic fact of the moral conscious-
ness is a personal idea. Moral action, in other words, is not
action defined by a particular physical content, but action defined
by the attitude of the self. The self here reacts to other selves
as concrete totals rather than as individualized aspects of the
general processes of social life. The self is truly moral so far
as the welfare and experience of other personalities is included
within its universe of practical motives. Whatever in the way
of mental cultivation, material possessions and other externals
THE SOCIAL WILL. 5 1
contributes to the efficiency of the self in willing and helping
to realize the welfare of others, comes thus to have a moral
significance. So far as the ends of the self include the welfare
of others merely as an incident, the plane of behavior sinks to
the level of prudential conduct; so far as the injury to others is
object of direct or indirect volition conduct becomes immoral.
In matters of merely prudential content the agent accepts other
personalities as a psychologic fact and makes abstraction of all
thought whether his relation to them makes for the attainment
of the ideal in their lives. Conduct solicitous of the welfare of
others is felt to possess, because of its psychic inclusiveness, the
higher moral worth, securing as it does in the long run, greater
breadth, richness and stability of individual life. It is in con-
duct based on the perception of an ideal that the self is most
frequently thrown into the condition of mental conflict; and yet
notwithstanding the pain and worry incident to this, the appear-
ance of inclusive ideals as motives to volition is felt to mark a
higher stage of moral development for the reason that the expe-
rience out of which the ideal is abstracted and which the ideal
returns to illumine and unify, has then a deeper social signifi-
cance. The relation between the individual and the social will,
which heretofore had existed in concrete in particular volitions,
now becomes a definite object of cognition, enabling the indi-
vidual to enter sympathetically into hopes, sorrows, ambitions,
and disappointments of others. Aside from its foundation in
a mechanism of firmly rooted habits, the moral will is largely a
matter of the sympathetic imaginations. A Hfe guided by ration-
ally perceived motives is likely to be more stable and harmonious
than one based upon immediate feeling; for in the latter case the
consciousness of the unity of the self with the other is in the
form of an isolated impulse with a corresponding lack of apper-
ceptive control. The outcome then depends upon the adapta-
tion of a preformed mechanism of native and acquired dispo-
sition to the particular situation.
6. Moral evil is essentially a condition of affairs in which
individual and social life is narrow, restricted, unstable and
inharmonious. It implies a condition of mental conflict, — a
conflict, however, in which mental systems instead of uniting
52 EDWIN ANDREW HAYDEN.
into higher and more comprehensive groups, are dissolving into
minor and fragmentary ones. Mental conflict, as we have
already seen, is the fundamental condition of psychic develop-
ment. It becomes more pronounced — not necessarily more tur-
bulent or violent — as the complexity of the social personality
increases. The partial wills through which the desires of social
groups express themselves, are not of equal importance in the
determination of the total will of society: so that it frequently
happens that the will of a particular social group encroaches
upon the wills of other groups, and in various ways makes its
own interests ascendant in the collective mind. In proportion
as these interests are simply group interests, the ascendancy
has the efi^ect of shrinking the general volume of social life, and
thus perverts the course of moral progress, except in those early
stages of social growth when the most important condition of
mental development is the formation of definite habits of obedi-
ence to some authority. At times the ascendancy of a partial will
means the dominance of an ideal capable of serving as the basis
of more comprehensive social organization, and although im-
posed by force upon the antagonistic social groups, lifts them to a
higher plane of social life if they are capable of assimilating the
ideal. Conflict of this sort is evidence of an overflowing vitality,
struggling to embody itself in new forms. On the other hand
the conflict may grow out of the dissolution of social bonds that
have previously restrained and coordinated the activities of the
various social groups. Thus freed from subordination in any
collective activity, the impulses of each group begin to assert
themselves in a turbulent fashion, with much energy, perhaps,
but with the energy coming from the dissolution of an unstable
system.
7. Aberrations of the individual will which are a reflex of
social disorder, must be carefully distmguished from the immoral
tendencies of the individual will that are private. The indi-
vidual caught in the maelstrom of social revolution, will give
his sanction to deeds of violence which in times of ordinary
peace and security he would blush to think of. The usual
balance within the universe of motives has been upset by objec-
tive conditions. But even in times of social unity and concord.
THE SOCIAL WILL. 53
there is a considerable number of individual wills which stand
out in more or less conflict with the social will. Under these
circumstances we have order and uniformity in the peripheral
stimulations that the individual mind receives, along with a lack
of harmony of thought and feeling. The conflict evidently
results from some peculiarity in the inner constitution of the
individual mind. In some cases the aberrant will is system-
atically controlled by a universe of motive which the social will
unreservedly seeks to inhibit. This universe may be of con-
siderable complexity, so far as mere intellectual relations are
concerned, but in respect to personal relations and feelings it is
poverty stricken. The purposes of the self are more or less coher-
ent, conflicting, however, with the ends which society deems
vital to its welfare. In other cases the individual will does not
come into systematic conflict with the social will, and yet may
considerably disturb the moral consciousness of the community.
A will of this type is not actuated by a permanent universe of
immoral motives — in fact it may possess a considerable wealth
of social feeling: its deficiency lies in its impulsiveness. Irritat-
ing circumstances seriously disturb the mental balance, setting
free an isolated impulse that does violence to the objective moral
order. In a final category may be put those cases of delinquency
which result from a general weakness of the mental organization.
They do not come into contact with the deeper currents of
social life to any serious extent; the resistance which they oflFer
to the disciplinary agents of society is of a negative kind, con-
sisting in a failure to return to the social fund any contribution
for the energy which society expends in their care and main-
tenance.
8. Thus the immoral life reflects but a fragment of the social
life or reflects it in an irregular and riotous manner. In moral
crises through which the individual mind may pass, there is
profound emotional disturbance; and yet in spite of this, numer-
ous mental systems are excited whose mutual restraint prevents
precipitate action. In the excitement of crime there is lacking
such reciprocal inhibitory action : the emotional disturbance runs
a serial course in which oftentimes a successive accumulation
goes on terminating in a violent outburst of passion that accom-
54 EDWIN ANDREW HATDEN.
plishes the act willed in such a horrible fashion as to surprise
the agent himself.
9. Returning to the consideration of the ethical ideal as a
variant of realized conceptions of conduct, we naturally encoun-
ter the question, What limit exists to the deviation of the ideal
from the practical morality of the times ? What is there to guar-
antee that the ideal which a nation sets before itself is something
more than a chimera, perhaps luring it on to ruin and destruc-
tion ? There is no a priori guarantee, although there are some
conditions which help to predetermine the variability of ideals,
or what amounts to the same thing, to make extreme forms
relatively infrequent. In the first place, as explained above,
the ethical ideal is a psychologic fact resulting from the normal
workings of the human mind upon personal and social data.
Any new moral principle or precept, or more inclusive applica-
tion of some old principle, is first of all conceived by some mind
of superior moral insight. The personality of the moral seer is
an outgrowth of the common social life both in the way of
hereditary equipment and acquired content: so that its idealiz-
ing activities are constrained to move within a definite circle of
experience. Man's physical heredity guarantees on the average
a native disposition adapted to a social economy, so that response
to social situations is possible long before any intellectual appre-
hension of social relations is reached. Instinct finds expression
in conscious processes in the form of desire, first in connection
with purely practical acts concerned with vital ends, then in
connection with apperceptive processes that aim at the removal
of some conflict in the world of things, and still later at the
removal of conflict within the world of ideas. But even in the
universe of abstract relations, the desires of our common human-
ity come in to direct the imagination and the understanding in the
construction of an ideal through which these desires are to
receive ampler satisfaction. The moral reason views existing
imperfections in their relation to an infinite process of devel-
opment, and in this way satisfies in part the desire for harmony
and order in the objective moral world. But it does not rest
content with merely doing this. Though the intellectual proc-
esses excited by conflict in the universe of ideal desires are
TIJE ASOCIAL WILL. 55
in some measure independent of practical volition, the primitive
tendency of the mind toward action never completely disappears.
The moral v^ill is preeminently a practical will, striving after
something more fundamental than consistency of ideation —
striving in fact after a consistency co-extensive with the person-
ality in its thought, feeling and action. Again, an ideal far
removed from the existing moral sentiment of the community,
although it is a logical development of that, cannot command a
passionate devotion from the people because of its lack of apper-
ceptive contact with the social mind. The impractical moral
ideal thus fails to find serious lodgment in the public mind, not
only because it fails as a postulate of the practical will to unify
the desires already ascendant in a more satisfactory manner
than at present, but also because its pursuit involves too much
pain and effort. The ideal must fit into the preformed mechan-
ism of the social disposition and be able to organize the practical
interests of life. There is continually going on a selection of
ideals, and even at times a selection of the idealist. Preoccu-
pation with ideal interests, to the neglect of vital conditions,
brings into play the forces of physical selection. Competition
between races with the resulting selection maintains a certain
harmony between the national ideal and the national character.
If the practical activities excited by the ideal are uniformly
unsuccessful, the ideal soon loses its ascendancy. The Roman
ideal of universal empire feeds on the success of Roman arms.
10. The utility of an ideal lies not alone in the harmony and
consistency of life which it makes possible, but also in the hope
and courage and through them the vigor of life which it inspires.
One of the peculiar traits of moral feeling is the permanent
satisfaction which it brings the individual, no matter what the
external accidents of his career may be. The finely constituted
moral nature feels that, no matter what obstacles have prevented
it from achieving a career rich in material content, it has still
nobly fulfilled its destiny in the world by putting forth every
effort to live the moral law as it conceived the same.
11. (a) The individual cherishes an ideal not only of him-
self but of the social order of which he is a part. The interaction
of these common desires of individual minds forms a collective
56 EDWIN ANDREW HATDEN.
process that is a social ideal. The social ideal is generally much
vaguer in its lineaments than the individual ideal, yet is frequently
a powerful stimulus to action because of the social emotion which
stands back of it. In the social ideal the collective mind expres-
ses as clearly as it can the desires which it has in regard to its
own constitution. The social ideal is generally most clearly
understood by the ruling class, who are the chief organs in the
selection of means and ends in the actual historic process in
which the ideal strives to embody itself. But almost every
individual consciousness feels to some extent national senti-
ments, no matter how lowly its organization may be. History,
literature, myth, folk-lore, in short, all tradition relating to the
deeper emotional interests, bring the ideal into more or less
clear expression in the individual mind. We may thus speak
with propriety of a national ideal so far as there exists in indi-
vidual minds a common motive to volitions that aim at realizing
a particular type of social personality. Usually the social person-
ality moves on a much lower ethical plane than the more exalted
individual wills. Nations, in their dealings with each other,
have been actuated largely by prudential motives, for the
reason that the national safety has been regarded as of supreme
value. The broader sympathy which has followed from com-
mercial intercourse and the ascendancy of a religion preaching
the brotherhood of man, has mitigated somewhat this national
egoism. We get evidence of a movement toward a higher plane
of collective ethics in some matters of international concern in
the idea that the lives of all nations have a moral worth in part
relative to a collective process that embraces all humanity.
1 1 . (b) A higher form of collective ethics means more com-
prehensive apperceptive control in the social mind. Moral con-
flict involves the mutual restraint as well as the mutual assistance
of mental systems which are components of the personality.
In a healthy condition of public morals, when rights are carefully
protected through the strict and impartial enforcement of the
law, the desires and volitions of the various social groups are
harmoniously combined in the social will. There is a full and
complete synthesis of the claims and interests of the various
groups according to accepted standards of right. On the other
THE SOCIAL WILL. 57
hand when there is a systematic violation of the rights of any
class, we have a partial and incomplete synthesis of mental proc-
esses in the social mind, due to the suppression of the desires
and volitions of the social group. The suppressed volitions
assert themselves as soon as the restraint is withdrawn, causing
a renewal of the mental conflict. In such periods of public
disorder, motives of the social will do not restrain each other
but add their energy one to another along the line of violence
and confusion.
12. The moral springs of action are kept in a healthy
condition only by effort. The social will in its effort to restrain
the individual will into harmony with itself, strengthens the
habits on which its character is founded and invigorates its emo-
tional life. All social institutions rest upon conflict in the
processes of the social mind, since through conflict the social
will is spurred on to constant endeavor, and thus escapes the
penalty of idleness, — extinction and decay. The resistance of
the physical gives us our industrial economy: of ignorance, our
educational economy: of evil, our moral economy. I speak of
these as economy: for running through them is the law of rational
effort which aims at a maximum of achievement for a given
expenditure.
13. The primary ethical feelings of love, friendship, duty,
obligation, attach most firmly to the ascendant personal universe
of the individual. What particular group of persons shall con-
stitute the personnel of this universe, depends upon the factors
which determine the strength of mental systems. In the early
stages of social growth, the ascendancy lies in the tribal asso-
ciation. Other forms of association like the family are too
unstable to furnish a definite set of experiences that will organ-
ize into a permanent universe of personal or social relations.
The tribal union is the instrument most concerned in the preser-
vation of social life in the early struggle for existence; and
round it are associated the most vivid, most intense and most
frequent of social experiences. The result is that the conscious-
ness of tribal ends forms the most stable mental system in the
individual mind, attracting to itself the moral feelings that are
the first to appear in social progress. Further mental develop-
58 EDWIN ANDREW HATDEN.
ment of the social personality brings changes tending in two
directions: one which is intensive, permeated by the intense
feeling of natural affection, resulting in the partial will of the
family group; the other extensive, embracing a multitude of
personalities within its scope, the will of the state. The will of
the family group is the first form which appears in that process
of infoldment in the social will that gives us ultimately an indi-
vidual will which has ends of its own, and which enables the
social will to find self-conscious expression. The collective
result of this process of infoldment is a rational social will
declaring itself through the agency of the state. Corresponding
to these two wills of the family and the state, are two systems of
moral motives in the individual mind, differing somewhat in
their constitution. In the sphere of family relations the most
fundamental motive is the feeling of natural affection, the tend-
ency of which is toward a complete obliteration of individual
and group interests, as separable factors, while in the sphere of
civic relations the sentiment of law, or the feeling of legal right,
is the basic motive — a motive of the understanding in which
more or less complete abstraction is made of the concrete deter-
minations of personality, and the individual is viewed simply
as the subject of certain rights and reciprocal duties.
14. Certain ceremonies, in particular the ceremony of adop-
tion, helped to extend the rigid limits which custom imposed
on the morality of primitive times. It is but natural that the
stranger should be practically without rights according to the
standards of primitive morality, for the reason that the savage
sees the individual only in the light of tribal ends, and so excludes
the stranger from the scope of social feeling. The thought of the
stranger as the member of some unknown or hostile tribe arouses
in the mind of the savage a real mental conflict, just as soon as
the feelings of common humanity begin to prompt him to extend
to the stranger the privileges of his family or clan. The device
of adoption according to the primitive way of thinking changes
the personality of the stranger in a manner satisfying to the
demands of tribal safety, and creates between the stranger and
the savage a system of reciprocal rights and duties sustained by
the common impulses which the tribal will aroused in their
THE SOCIAL WILL. 59
minds. Adoption extends the sphere of obligation without
impairing the strength of the feeling, since the ceremony itself
is a solemn affair by which the sanction of the tribal gods is
obtained for a more intimate personal relation. It makes the
limits of social feeling more elastic, but could evidently work
only little change in the mental disposition of the tribe, founded
as it is upon rigid customs. Far more powerful for change is
the contact brought about by war or commerce; especially if
political union under a single head is the result, provided the
two cultures are equally virile, or nearly enough so, in order
that one may not completely extinguish the other. With the
thorough intermixture of the two races, goes on a corresponding
incorporation of their cultures, resulting in a more complex
civilization, and a greater openness to foreign influences. The
individual moral universe has been both broadened and deep-
ened : the virtues common to the two cultures have now a w^ider
social validity, while each culture has contributed some virtues
peculiar to itself.
15. Besides the rules of conduct valid for the entire social
order, there are special rules valid only within some particular
social group. This necessarily results from the fact that social
groups have desires and sentiments of their own. Certain vir-
tues are more fundamental to the life of one group than they are
to another. The differentiation in class morality is for obvious
reasons pronounced when social classes are rigidly separated
from each other by hereditary lines. The desire of the superior
caste to maintain their ascendancy leads to the adoption of
elaborate ceremonials and usages which make the difference in
rank plain to the eye and so accustom all to the thought of
rank as a just and necessary principle of social organization.
Moral respectability lies chiefly in meeting the ceremonial exac-
tions of one's caste. A socialization of caste morality begins
when an interchange of thought and feeling between the differ-
ent castes sets in. The movement of ideas is more rapid from
above downward, as the intellectual fermentation in the upper
social ranks is the more vigorous; but in compensation there is
a slower and more massive flow of social feeling upward from
the heart of the multitude which suffuses the whole social life.
6o EDWIN ANDREW HAY DEN.
The combined result is a system of national virtues that serve
as a groundwork for the more special virtues of the various
social classes.
1 6. A social life of manifold activities, characterized by a
rapid interchange of ideas, is governed less by habit and more
by a consensus of motive resulting from an openness to sugges-
tions and impressions along numerous lines. Such openness is
due to the increased range of individual experience which makes
possible the elaboration of mental systems of varied content.
The resulting increase in the breadth of sympathy leads to a
change in moral values. The past no longer commands the
obedience and loyalty that it once did, for its sanctions lose
something of their former force, owing to a growing dispo-
sition to accept the institutions of the past for what they are
worth as contributing much or little toward realizing the domi-
nant ideals of the present. While the individual will has now
vastly extended its realm of social relation, it has been to some
extent forced to make abstraction of those details of personality
which were formerly the chief source of inspiration and strength.
Though the old feelings which clustered around the narrow but
deep personal experience of family life have been somewhat
weakened by the change, in their stead have come others which
may even more constrain the individual will to self-sacrifice.
The individual mind is assailed by an indefinitely larger num-
ber of impressions, and so far as these have a common tend-
ency they organize in a cumulative way into motives of con-
siderable strength. But the relaxing of the bonds of traditionary
constraint which results from the openness of the individual
mind to social impressions of numerous orders, makes possible
a great number of ideas which may be operative in determining
the activity of the imagination to the construction of a corre-
sponding number of ideals. Some confusion then results in the
matter of moral values. This invariably happens in the opening
up of new lines of social endeavor. It becomes at times under
such conditions difficult to subsume all the concrete acts of
practical conduct under the old moral principles. The diffi-
culty continues until through the mutual inhibition of antago-
nistic motives and the rational synthesis of harmonious incen-
THE SOCIAL WILL. 6 1
tives, the will is supplied with some definite moral concept that
sobers and tempers the imagination. Once that confusion exists
as to moral values within a particular domain of social life
egoism asserts itself in the more vigorous natures and causes
self-deception in regard to the moral quality of actual achieve-
ment. When some conception emerges capable of harmonizing
some of the new practices with the great body of accumulated
moral precepts, the accidental and the transient, which are
essentially the immoral complications in the situation, disappear
and the social mind goes back in thought and feeling to the
permanent ends which are the indispensable basis of all devel-
opment.
17. The principles of morality thus seem to stand in vital
relation to the mental health of the individual and social will.
Certain disturbances of feeling are symptomatic of mental dis-
order: melancholia, for instance, indicates the severance of the
natural relation between feeling and action: the mind becomes
suspicious of itself, suspecting the sincerity of its own motives;
minutely attentive to its feelings in themselves for no ulterior
reason. In the excitement of mania, on the other hand, the
mental life expands: projects enter the mind with astonishing
rapidity, in utter disregard of physical possibility or of moral
obligation. But out of the fury nothing permanent emerges,
for the very violence of the emotive processes suspends the apper-
ceptive activity necessary to efficient mental work. Contrast
with these two conditions that of a mind sound in its moral
constitution. In the latter we see a general hopefulness, faith,
respect for self and others urging the will on to systematic and
controlled endeavor. Much the same may be said of the social
mind. Faith in itself, hopefulness of the future, reverence for
the past, a sentiment of honor and of law — these in moderation
are the indispensable conditions of high efficiency in the social
will. Wide-spread corruption, especially if it occurs with a
general state of social apathy and indifference, is an unmistak-
able sign of social decay. These conditions are of course reflected
in the individual life; but such demoralization of individual life
differs both in its origin and in its nature from personal degen-
eracy. The former is due to a lack of proper discipHne from
62 EDWIN ANDREW HATDEN.
the social medium; the latter to an internal derangement of the
personality resting on an impaired physical heredity. But there
are some cases where the two merge imperceptibly into each
other: many succumb to temptation in times of profound social
disorder and excitement who under less exacting conditions
would round out a career of decency and respectability. There
may be no impairment in the abstract conceptions of right,
duty, law, justice, but the blunted moral feelings cause an
impairment of the practical moral judgment, so that the moral
identity of concrete acts that belong to the same moral category
is not perceived. Moral conceptions become detached from
moral attitudes and form a sort of floating mental system.
Moral feeling "is a function of organization,'' writes Maudsley,
"and is essentially dependent upon the integrity of that part of
the nervous system which ministers to its manifestations as is
any other display of mental function. Its sanction is given to
such actions as are conducive to the well-being and the progress
of the race, and its prohibitions fall upon such actions as would,
if freely indulged in, lead to degeneration if not extinction of
mankind." Moral feeling then is the most sensitive index of
the mental integrity of the individual who has received a thor-
ough training in a social environment enforcing rigorous stand-
ards of conduct. A delusion may seize a community and lead
to official acts that violate all canons of justice and mercy, as
did the witchcraft delusion at Salem; but seizures of this sort
are usually ephemeral, as history testifies. They do not excite
the apprehension that a delusion of the individual mind does,
because they are largely a matter of the intellect, aroused by
external excitation, while a delusion of the individual mind
exists in spite of the innumerable impressions of the social envi-
ronment which tend to inhibit it. With this goes a derangement
of the aff'ective life which does not accompany a belief merely
erroneous. But in spite of these exceptions, the general proposi-
tion remains that the immoral life both public and private is the
life of disorder, confusion, violence and weakness.
CHAPTER V.
THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF LEGAL RIGHT.
I. The social will, in its composite organization, lacks the
unity of the individual will in action, though motived by more
numerous and more comprehensive ends. As a mental system
it is composed of minor groups that can function in far greater
independence of each other than is the case with the contents
of the individual will. The affective processes are likewise
much more delicately balanced in the individual personality
than in the social personality. We find, for instance, a frenzy
of excitement spreading through a community which in the
case of the individual would indicate grave mental disorder in
the way of systematic mania. An emotion in spreading through
the social medium undergoes considerable mutation as it spreads
from one social stratum to another and even from one individual
to another within the same social stratum. Take the instance
of a piece of legislation which affects certain property rights.
The social classes who possess no property view the matter with
comparative indifference, while the particular group whose inter-
ests are threatened oppose in anger and indignation the pro-
posed legislation. The emotive attitude of the individual mind
toward a situation is for the moment unitary, but emotive pro-
cesses in the social mind may at a particular moment possess
all shades and variations. Now we have seen that the moral
consciousness is essentially the personal, the personaHty in
some form or other being the end of action. It is then evident
that the very condition for moral contact in its higher aspects,
is an intimacy of individual contact by which each comes to
have detailed knowledge of the personality of the other. As the
sphere of contact widens, the finer and more delicate adjust-
ments of friendship cease, partly because of a lack of intimate
knowledge of other people, and partly because of the absence of
certain emotive processes, instinctive in their nature, which
64 EDWIN ANDREW HATDEN,
the bare notion of social relations would not excite to any extent.
Intimacy sometimes arises from a community of interests, as in
the case of certain voluntary associations; but this is generally
feeble in comparison with that which arises out of the instinctive
needs of humanity. Still more attenuated is the personal feeling
when we pass to economic organization, where men enter into
coordinated activities largely from a desire for certain physical
objects capable of satisfying human want. The contact there
is reduced down to a sphere of ideas relating to physical proc-
esses. In so far, however, as in any of these spheres of contact,
the personality of the agent comes in as a conscious factor or
condition, rights and duties are created. Obligation attaches
to the contract between the employer and the laborer, as to the
rate of wages, hours of work, etc., not because of the laborer's
position in the industrial organization as an economic force,
but because in and through the terms of the contract ramifies
the personality of each. Now it is evident that an emotion
which arises from intimate personal knowledge and relation can
never be a motive to the social will in the full sense of the term.
In order to rise to the level of social motivation, an idea must
arouse those mental systems which are organized with approxi-
mate equality in each individual mind. The social will, in so
far as it is truly social, aims at ends valid for the whole social
organization, and never makes the individual as such the direct
object of volition, or, in other wordsy the personality of the indi-
vidual comes in merely as an incident in the pursuance of gen-
eral ends. The juristic personality is merely an abstract concep-
tion, a construct of the understanding and reason, and is a conven-
ient fiction by means of which legal relations are systematically
thought of. Thus the law specifies certain mental qualifications
necessary for testamentary competency, and in doing so takes
account of certain well-known facts of human nature : but even
in the judicial application of the law, where the law comes in
contact with the concrete personality, the history of that person-
ality is a matter of concern only in so far as it helps to determine
whether the given individual possesses the specified soundness
of mind. The law is interested in maintaining some and sup-
pressing other systems of personal relationship more than it is
THE SOCIAL WILL. 65
in the instrument of these relationships, the concrete personality,
although it is constrained to operate through the latter in doing
so. This, of course, is the ideal of what the law should be,
rather than the practice which actually obtains, though it is a
psychologic fact like any other ideal.
2. The first way in which the social will acts upon the indi-
vidual will is in the way of restraint, through the mechanism
of the law. It arises out of conflict between individual wills
which disturbs the consciousness of right of the community
and especially the consciousness of right as organized in the
government. The psychologic difference between the conscious-
ness of law as it exists in the mind of the community and in the
mind of the government may be expressed by saying that in the
first case it has more of the nature of a sentiment and in the
second more that of volition. The fundamental condition for
this inhibitive reaction of the social will is the externalization
of the idea in the individual mind in the form of some act, since
this is the only way in which an idea in the individual mind can
set going a collective process. The reaction of the social will
has a double effect: one on the individual will and the other on
the social will itself. The individual will has the consciousness
of its guilt brought before it, and at the same time through the
special discipline to which it is subjected, may undergo an
educative process that leads to the formation of a character as
harmonious, at least, to the social will as the condition of per-
sonal liberty demands. In other words, the excesses of the
individual will are brought within the Hmits of tolerance of the
social will. The crime conflicts with the consciousness of law
in the public mind. If the crime goes unpunished, there is a
blunting of the feeling of legal right. As soon as a community
habituates itself to letting crimes go unpunished, the feeHng of
hostility which the infraction of right arouses, weakens, as no
feeling remains intact which becomes permanently disjoined
from the corresponding act. Punishment maintains the integ-
rity of the feeling of right in the social mind, because it furnishes
a definite channel for the expression of the feeling and thus avoids
the paralyzing effect of what would be otherwise a mere emotional
fermentation, besides emphasizing the concept of the right.
66 EDWIN ANDREW HATDEN.
The social will also comes into contact with the individual will
in a more positive fashion, performing functions that are more
creative than those of mere inhibitive supervision. The social
will as organized in the state sets before itself certain specific
ends that aim at realizing a certain type of social personality.
The state appears as an undertaker in various enterprises
whose magnitude is so great and the return for which is so
remote and imperceptible that private associations are not dis-
posed to assume the risk. The most powerful motive in private
association, outside of religious impulse, is the economic one.
As economic value rests upon scarcity, implying limitations in
the powers of production, there are many things desirable
because of their social utility whose pursuit cannot be brought
within the scope of this motive. Many lines of endeavor which
from the standpoint of immediate economic return, appear
insane and delusive, like the chemical tinkering of the alchem-
ists, do yield in the course of centuries enormous returns on the
energy invested. Back of all economic activity must be a senti-
ment of patriotism, of religion and of kinship. A high indus-
trial economy comes only after centuries of effort during which
an intense race spirit and consciousness has been fabricated.
An ardent race feeling is an absolute necessity for survival in
the struggle for existence going on among competing social
groups. Let a nation lose faith in itself; let it become indifferent
to its own past achievements, and view without emotion the
sacrifices of its martyrs and heroes; let mutual trust and confi-
dence, sympathy and virtue pass away and its doom is sealed.
A national song or hymn, a work of great poetic genius — in
short, art in all its varied forms gives articulate expression to
the deepest hopes and aspirations of a people and so converts
a vague emotional tendency into a social volition that molds
the national life and raises the plane of collective endeavor both
in the way of its spiritual and material achievements. In the
encouragement, direction and control of the social agencies
making for the higher life — even in some cases directly super-
vising them — the state appears as the most efficient instrument
of the social will.
3. The contrast between the legal and the moral in regard
THE SOCIAL WILL. 6/
to personal relations, pointed out in the opening paragraph of
this chapter, calls for further consideration. We may speak of
the impersonal character of certain social relations, not in the
sense that they are relations holding of impersonal, i. e., phys-
ical things, but in the sense that the universe of intercourse
between the minds concerned is a mental system in which
abstraction is made of the specific determinations of personality.
When a judge, for example, renders a decision in strict accord
with the merits of the case, as we say, he is treating the matter
in a way as objective as a scientist does the facts of nature. His
personality is simply the instrument through which the social
will expresses itself in respect to the point in question. Of course
self-feeling may be present but not in the way of prejudice
against or sympathy for the party to the case: it is present in
connection with the ideal he has of himself as the impartial
administrator of the law. But in accordance with the fact that
any mental system shares in some degree the unity of the per-
sonality, there is reflected into the decision to some extent the
personal bias of the judge, either unconsciously through the
limitation of habit and temperament, or consciously with a
knowledge that such is the case. The result is dependent upon
the special circumstances. In the case of the intended depart-
ure from the strict demands of the law, if it is done from preju-
dice, passion, hatred, and other egoistic motives of no moral
worth, positive mischief is the probable result; if the departure
is made from a consideration of the higher moral ends of social
welfare, and if no injustice is done thereby to any particular
person, undisputed gain follows in the way of making the law
as a whole a more efficient instrument of social progress. The
unintended modification of the law goes on through judicial
interpretation. The law at best can only deal with classes of
acts, with only very general reference to the material conditions
of the act : so that acts are continually occuring which diff'er so
much in their material circumstances from anything previously
coming under judicial cognizance, that the highest legal insight
is demanded in dealing with them. Right here is an oppor-
tunity for the development of professional and technical
opinion through the collaboration of decisions that grow
68 EDWIN ANDREW HATDEN.
and expand in the course of time to such an extent that a new
right has been created. In this collaboration of judicial opinion
are acting also those general social influences modifying the
spirit of the entire legal system. But it is the manifest ideal of
justice to reduce the personal factor to a minimum, and to do
this certain checks and balances are introduced in the judicial
machinery. In some cases appeal is permitted; in other cases
the verdict is a collective decision of a court consisting of sev-
eral judges. A collective verdict is held to minimize personal
bias by broadening the view of the case through the interchange
of judicial opinion and the cancellation of irrational or chance
factors. The law should correspond with the general sentiment
of justice in the community, though it frequently happens that
a law securing a fair average of justice in former times no
longer expresses in many of its details the existing social senti-
ment. Judicial interpretation plays an important part in main-
taining the vitality of the law by a process of slow but continuous
adjustment to social changes. The legal sentiment of a com-
munity is in a healthy condition when it does not consist of the
mere motive to preserve the legal system, but of a willingness
to obey it because it is felt to be the most important objective
condition in the moral progress of mankind.
4. The consciousness of law varies in its organization in the
minds of the various social groups. It is most sensitively con-
stituted with respect to those rights the maintenance of which
is most necessary to the ends and purposes of the group life, as
determined by the psychological conditions governing the
strength and stability of mental systems. Out of the experiences
which enter into the composition of the dominant universe in
the mind of the group, imagination develops an ideal which the
group seeks to impose upon its members — the ideal through
which the group-conscience declares itself: nonconformity to
which on the part of the individual will calls forth the reaction
of the group will, sometimes in the way of personal disapproval,
at other times in the way of compulsion exercised through the
channels of the law. It is in those fundamental points round
which the self-feeling of the group flows, that the individual is
likely to have the clearest consciousness of right as defended
THE SOCIAL WILL. 69
and protected by the law. The consciousness of legal right, if
it really figures as a motive to the will, is something more
than a mere system of abstract concepts of the rights and duties
enforced by the law: back of these must be the self-feeling which
arises when something is felt to be an important condition of
the welfare of the self. It is especially on the side of feeling that
the vigorous enforcement of the law strengthens the conscious-
ness of legal right. If officials are derelict in their sworn duty,
allowing an open violation of the law, the injury done extends
far beyond the incidents of the particular case; the feeling and
respect for all law is weakened in the public mind. Not only
is the strict enforcement of the law in those cases in which the
state takes the initiative in punishing, of fundamental impor-
tance in keeping alive the feeling for the law in the public mind,
but perhaps equally important is the action of the individual
in asserting his right in cases where the state leaves the enforce-
ment of the right optional with the individual. Where the indi-
vidual puts forth his own effort to assert the supremacy of the
law, although it may be from a purely egoistic motive to pain
his assailant or recover material damages, and not for the sake
of the law itself, still his own consciousness of law is strengthened
and through his example that of others. In fact the failure to
assert the right impairs to some extent the moral vigor of the
individual concerned, for his self-feeling has been aroused with-
out issuing into appropriate action. The willingness to abandon
one's own right, even if the law views it with indifference, is
incompatible with that sturdy and manly sense of justice and
of law demanded of every citizen of a democracy. A virile
sense of right in the minds of the great mass of people is the /
best safeguard against the prostitution of public interests by
corrupt officials, for it makes demands of them in the way of
rectitude and honesty that a timid spirit, hesitating to demand
its dues, does not.
5. The energy with which the feeling is aroused in a conflict
of right, depends upon the conditions governing the interaction
of mental systems. The invasion of a legal right is a special
instance of conflict in the social mind. Some act is committed
which cannot be incorporated with the system of rights main-
70 EDWIN ANDREW HATDEN.
tained by the law: the act is an objective fact, a system of per-
ceptual relations, which arouses into full or partial activity the
system of ideas and feelings constituting the consciousness of
the right. Within certain limits the consciousness of legal right
is strong in proportion to the frequency with which the law is
invoked to resist the invasion of rights. Where the legal insti-
tutions have been developed largely as the result of national
effort, the nation is likely to have a healthy sense of justice.
Nothing confirms this proposition better than the history of
legal development in England, in particular that of the common
law which is a vast body of rights developed through judicial
decisions determining particular concrete rights. A people
which has much to do with the creation of its own laws, has its
consciousness of the fundamental principles of moral right and
justice largely bound up with the consciousness of law. A class
which has never made use of the law as a means of its material
or moral welfare, has no conception, much less a feeling of right.
The rights which it does have, are due largely to the good will
and conscience of the ruling classes. Rights which have been
thus conferred, and not won by effort, do not rest upon habits
of action firmly rooted in the personality of the class whose
welfare they sustain. Aggression does not call forth a moral
reaction in the form of disturbed feeling of right, but only the
response of animal hostility. Too much litigation may, however,
impair the consciousness of right. The enforcement of rights
through the agency of the law is a rough and harsh process; and
in the pain and irritation which is necessarily incident, the moral
feeling for the law is frequently lost in the feeling of revenge or
animosity. As soon as the law is severed in thought and feeling
from the consciousness of moral right, it may degenerate simply
into an instrument serving no purpose but to vex and harass
an enemy.
( 6. The vividness and intensity of the experiences connected
with the establishing of a right, are important factors. That
which has been acquired at much cost and sacrifice, usually
stands in intimate relation to self-feeling, and has thus strong
affective elements back of it, helping to maintain its ascendancy.
A right gained through profound social disturbances is firmly
THE SOCIAL WILL. 7 1
implanted in the memory and affection of the people : they feel
that they have put into it so much of their very life and being
that it is an integral part of themselves. A whole array of power-
ful sentiments and emotions — family affection, patriotism, reli-
gious feeling — is brought to the support of a right acquired at
the cost of the nation's blood and treasure.
7. The comprehensiveness of the interest involved affects
the stability of a right. A right which ramifies through the whole
social structure, will call forth proportional resistance to any
disturbance. If the given right is enjoyed by all social classes,
it is a motive to the whole will of society, and as such can com-
mand more energy to resist its invasion than only a particular
right. The zeal with which a people rush to the defense of the
national honor when assailed by a foreign power, shows the
strength of motives which are supported by a tide of emotion
surging through the entire current of social life.
8. A right derives strength from its interconnection with
other rights in a system of rights. Custom makes for self-con-
sciousness in a community in that it expresses a usage known
to be valid for the whole community, but the custom precedes
and does not follow as the result of a clearly conceived idea in
the social mind. When, however, specific declarations of the
social will exist in the form of statutory enactments, society has
arrived at a very clearly defined idea of the various ends of its
own existence, which form a relatively coherent system. There
emerges the consciousness of a system of law, over and above the
concrete laws which form its content. The idea of the legal
system comes to be a motive and leads to efforts looking to the
maintenance of the legal order itself. A law then acquires a
force as being the member of a system, beyond that which
comes from defending some particular right.
9. Where the enforcement of the right is a matter of option
with the individual, there is a likelihood that he will look at the
right and the consequences which flow from its invasion, largely
from the standpoint of his own private interests, ignoring the
wider social results in the way of the reflex influence of the
enforcement of a particular right upon the consciousness of
right in the mind of the community. So long as the enforcement
72 EDWIN ANDREW HATDEN.
of the right is left to the individual himself, it is subject to all
the caprices of individual temperament: personal feelings like
revenge, anger, jealousy, fear, come in to operate independent
of impersonal standards. There will consequently be irregu-
larity, excess, deficiency of action in the enforcement of the right.
The first step toward increasing the security of the right, con-
sists in surrounding the penalty which the injured party may
exact with certain limitations; here the violence and excess of
the individual will is checked by the social will which declares
itself through the particular rules. The volition in which the
individual exacts vengeance, comes to include social motives
that subject the emotive elements of the volition to some
restraint. The right of punishment is first felt in the history
of legal development as largely an individual matter. The
socialization of the primitive power exercised by the individual
/ in avenging his own wrongs reaches its final stage when the
j right of punishment is taken entirely out of the hands of the
' individual and vested in some regularly constituted authority
which represents the community in the case. The changes which
have occurred in the meantime in the individual and public
consciousness of right, are numerous. In a general way moral
conceptions have become more clearly defined in the social
mind : the social mind has reached some consciousness of itself
as a moral entity, in both idea and feeling, as is attested by the
fact that its own will is now authoritative in the punishment
of crime; while the individual now views crime from a wider
social standpoint, seeing that conceptions of certain social stand-
ards, apprehended as valid for all minds, now enter into the
composition of his idea of crime. Further, the state in making
general provision in an authorized agency for the punishment
of crime has been actuated by motives of general validity, and
not by feelings and ideas arising out of a particular case. Thus
the state has provided in the personality of its agents a psychic
device for the judging of crime which makes accidental feelings
and ideas, such as arise in the mind of the injured person, as
little determinative as possible. Of course feeling is necessary
in any volition, whether public or private; but it is a very impor-
tant matter for legal development whether such feeling be objec-
THE SOCIAL WILL. 73
tive, relating to the mechanism of social acts, or subjective,
relating to the personality of the individual in relative detach-
ment from the social v^hole.
10. Mental conflict has played a considerable part in the
development of legal right. Those rights for which society
maintains an elaborate protective agency, are evidently vital to
institutions and relations v^hich society regards of fundamental
importance. The value which the social will attaches to them,
is measured by the vigor of the resistance it offers to the invasion
of them. In the domain of legal right the social disposition is
receiving articulate expression in certain specific declarations of
the social will. The mass of social experience which is here in
function is so great that the resulting mental inertia resists
change. Old legal rights are thus imbedded in psychic mechan-
isms of considerable stability. Many of the most fundamental
rights have been secured only by revolutionary means, that is,
by profound disturbances in the social personality in which not
only have old habits been broken up but new conceptions of
social and political values have emerged. But the mental con-
flict involved in the creation of legal rights, is seen not only in
those more profound psychic movements which involve more or
less the whole social will, but also in those more limited mental
processes in which the will of the individual or group is con-
cerned. Legal rights which are judicial affirmations of pre-
existing customs and usages, have arisen in these minor conflicts
of the individual or group will. The experiences of effort and
struggle, which accompany the mental conflict, act as powerful
motives to maintain the right during the first stages of its ascend-
ancy. As the assertion of the right becomes more and more a
matter of habit, these experiences lapse from memory, and
leave the right a rule whose origin is no longer felt. In the
absence of direct historic instruction to the contrary, the indi-
vidual born into an old social order in which thorough harmony
existed between the legal institutions and the national character,
would be ignorant of the nature of the real process by which
the idea of a legal right rises to the status of volition in the
public mind.
II. The extent to which the individual feels the law as a
74 EDWIN ANDREW HAYDEN.
constraint depends upon the degree to which it restricts the
spontaneous flow of thought in his own mind. If a strong desire
arises in his mind that runs counter to the law, his processes of
thought are blocked, and the idea of the law as an objective
condition of conduct comes into full consciousness. While the
psychological nature of these conflicts is much the same as that
of any other conflict, the moral significance of the conflict varies
considerably.
^ 12. The atomistic way of conceiving social relations looks
/iipon the state largely as a coercive agency standing over in
somewhat mechanical opposition to the individual. The power
of compulsory subordination which the state possesses is of
course one of the fundamental incidents of its constitution, but
to emphasize this aspect of state function to the exclusion of
others, shows a serious lack of insight into the mental nature of
society. Civil institutions are from such a standpoint merely
artificial arrangements which men can enter into as freely and
dissolve as freely as they do a business corporation or any other
purposive association. Those processes in the mind of the
individual in which he thinks, feels and wills the part of a
citizen, are, however, possible only because his mind and the
other minds of the particular political order, interact in a col-
lective mental process that extends backward through many
centuries. The same historic development which has given
legal and political institutions and relations, has created the
citizen as the subject of legal and political rights, with his love
of liberty and his sentiment of law. It is only in a social order
that a personality can exist, i. e., a psychic entity in which the
consciousness of its own being is a motive; and of course there
is implied in all this corresponding institutions that maintain
objective conditions that render this motive effective.
13. In the desire for freedom the individual does not view
himself as isolated from others, but as a member of a mental com-
munity in which a certain range of free determination of indi-
vidual volition is secured through a system of reciprocal rights
and duties. The practice of freedom must to some extent
precede the desire for freedom. An animal is sometimes said
to "desire its freedom" through a courtesy of speech that has
THE SOCIAL WILL. 75
no strict regard for psychologic fact; but in the light of the
discussion of desire given in a previous chapter, it is evident
that the motive impelling the animal to escape its confines is a
feeling of unpleasantness resulting from impeded action. A/
social desire like the desire for civic freedom can arise in the>^!l_
individual mind only as the result of its interaction with other /*^
minds in which the same desire is simultaneously developed,)
and thus presupposes certain social practices and experiences
out of which the mind can elaborate it. The routine of social
experience necessary to the development of definite and fixed
legal and political concepts implies objectively modes of conduct
generally obtaining in the social order, and corresponding
rights with a regularly constituted agency to enforce them. The
common consciousness of right means, therefore, a general har-
mony between the volitions of the individual will and those of
the social will, though at times conflict at some points of contact
occurs.
14. The particular institutions through which the feeling of
right expresses itself, define and make real the feeling by con-
necting it with definite forms of activity. The individual, so
far as he is aware of the authority which by common consent
is vested in these institutions, has a conception of a common end
which is being furthered by their enforcement, and must on the
whole regard them as equally indispensable to his own well-
being, though at particular times he may be blind to the truth
on account of some conflict with certain of his inclinations. To
the extent that such is the case obedience to the existing stand-
ards of right is a matter of free determination of the individual
will and not of constraint by a motive externally determined
and deriving but little support from the apperceptive activities
of the mind. The beginning of the consciousness of legal right)
as a moral condition of man's existence, is obedience to the\
social standards of right expressed in custom. The social prepa-
ration which the discipline of custom makes for the higher
morality of duty, consists in forming habits that inhibit some
desires and in connection with these, a consciousness of a com-
mon welfare. A considerable portion of the motives which
make for obedience to law, consists of habits formed with refer-
76 EDWIN ANDREW HATDEN.
ence to concrete situations arising in the various private asso-
ciations of which the individual is a member. It is here because
of the more simple character of the social relations, that the
fact of a common life is most clearly conceived and strongly felt.
The opinion that the individual in passing from the life of the
simple social groups to the life of the larger group of a political
society, is completely bisected in his personality by the ascend-
ancy of an entirely new set of motives, is at variance with all
the laws of psychic causation. Undoubtedly a man in his func-
tion of a political subject is actuated by motives different in
some respects from those dominant in his mind in other spheres
of association; but still a considerable amount of psychic mate-
rial in the way of habit and idea is carried over from private
lines of social endeavor to public ones. Participation in the
common life of private associations, tends to develop a conscious-
ness of a collective well-being and a willingness to subordinate
in some degree individual preferences and inclinations to the
will of others, which will stand one in good stead in his civic
relations.
15. The organization of the consciousness of a common
well-being varies considerably in the history of culture. In the
early periods of social development when the social will comes
to expression in the individual consciousness chiefly in the form
of impulsive motives, the collective is felt rather than clearly
apprehended by the intellect. Historic effects have been organ-
ized in the social mind in habits and simple ideational systems
in which only the most obvious relations of cause and effect are
conceived. Any social movement is understood only through
the changes it produces in the concrete relations of one indi-
vidual to another. In the emotional excitement which at times
sweeps through the social order, the individual passes through
experiences of unusual intensity and is borne onward by a
stream of life which he is powerless to resist. But up to this
point the consciousness of a common life is a psychological,
not an ethical fact. The individual is moved to action by
motives externally excited, or by those which spring directly
out of the character or disposition and form a system of practi-
cal tendencies of the will. It has in it no ideal of a common
THE SOCIAL WILL. 77
good. A somewhat higher stage is reached, not only so far as
the intellectual apprehension of social relations but in a more
important way so far as moral development is concerned, when
the particular relations through which the individual appre-
hends his connection with the social whole, are thought of as
a common good in which he and others share in realizing some
ideal of self. Whenever the law steps in to protect the individual
from the invasion of these rights, he has direct demonstrable
experience of the law as a practical condition of the moral order.
Indeed the firm connection between the idea of the law and voli-
tions operating within the practical relations of life is the neces-
sary element in any effective consciousness of legal right, no
matter what the individual's theoretical insight into the law as
a social factor may be; and it is really the absence of such asso-
ciation that in part makes possible the criminal mind. A weak
mental connection between the idea of the law and practical
volition indicates that the law is not fulfilling its true mission
in the social order : it indicates some serious lack of harmony
between the national character and the legal institutions. This
is the case when partial or group interests become ascendant
and use the law with all its accumulated energy to constrain
the social will into harmony with their demands; or when a
nation imposes its own laws upon a subject people without any
regard to native law or custom; or again when in the moral decay
of a nation, insincerity and apathy have seized a people, and
there is wanting the zeal and energy to enforce a system of laws
adapted to a sturdy and resolute character. Provided there is
widespread peace and security in the enjoyment of the ordinary
private rights of business and the other common relations of
life, considerable harmony between the legal institutions and
the social disposition may exist, with but little of that higher
ideahsm in the consciousness of law that makes the individual
take an active and watchful interest in the law as the most effi-
cient means of attaining the ends of collective welfare. He
looks upon the state much as he does a business partnership,
giving it his hearty support because he feels it as a practical
necessity. Perhaps the higher civic idealism is not attainable
in a social order where there is a sharp separation in thought
78 EDWIN ANDREW HAT DEN.
and practice between political and legal rights. However ineffi-
cient in some, perhaps many respects, democracy may be as a
form of political organization, there is in it the possibility of the
average person rising to a higher moral plane in his conception
and feeling for the law than in a political order where the task
of legislation and administration is the work of an hereditary
class.
1 6. The consciousness of collective ends and existence
becomes more precise in its ideational contents not only through
the knowledge practically acquired through state affairs, but
from many theoretical disciplines like history, political science
and sociology. When to all this knowledge from whatever
source obtained, is added feeling strong enough to raise the
entire mental system to the status of a volition, a certain ideal of
national existence has emerged that is to be a practical force in
social life. And as the political organization is the medium
through which social organization is most authoritatively ex-
pressed, this ideal is most intimately associated both in thought
and deed with the activities of the state. This statement
must not be taken to mean that the ideal of collective ends has
been the sole motive or force acting to organize the social will
in the state, for as a matter of history other motives of inferior
moral worth have cooperated with it. The national ideal exists
imbedded in fact in a complex of experiences relating to indi-
vidual as well as social ends; but the fact of importance is that
the ideal exists, whatever may be its connections with other
mental states, and so makes to the extent of its ascendancy the
political order a moral one as well. No state would rest secure
even upon that higher form of selfishness, in which the individual
looks at things from the social point of view on account of pru-
dential motives. Egoism of itself tends to shrink the social
horizon and obscure in the individual mind conditions and rela-
tions that are necessary to the realization of his own ambition.
The calculation of purely personal advantage weakens the
strength and spontaneity of action which social life in so many
of its circumstances demands. A certain interest for the social
life in and of itself is a necessary condition for that enlarged
grasp of social relations without which a career successful in
THE SOCIAL WILL. yg
merely external achievement is possible. A motive aroused
solely by external constraint, i. e., one which excites an act
not because of its general harmony with the constitution of the
personality but because of its strength, could not be relied upon
to render uniform support to the interests of the state; for as
soon as the external circumstances which excited it pass away,
the feeling and desires which represent the organized tenden-
cies of the self are sure to assert themselves. It is precisely at
times when the political order needs the most defense that a
motive of this sort could be least relied upon. Mere restraint
could never create a personality as an organized system of
thought, feeling and volition; and to the extent that any insti-
tution rests upon coercion, is the mental life back of it narrow
and impoverished. Coercion is justified at times simply because
the repetition of a thing, even when done under compulsion,
forms a corresponding habit that may later function as a part
of a process which in its totality is free and rational. Despotism
for this reason has a sanction in the ethics of political develop-
ment.
1 7. Thus the state is not to be conceived as something over
and above the humanity which manifests itself through social
institutions. It is a collective phenomenon of a certain char-
acter existing in and through the reciprocal relations which the
members of society sustain to each other. Society as organized
in the state differs from society as organized in other forms in
the ends of its existence and the mode of attaining such ends.
The supreme compulsory power which is an incident of the
constitution of the state, derives social significance from the
fact that it is compulsion exercised according to law, maintain-
ing a system of rights which are necessary to a collective life.
CHAPTER VI.
THE SOCIAL WILL AS EXPRESSED IN THE STATE! THE THEORY
OF SOVEREIGNTY IN ITS PSYCHOLOGICAL BEARINGS.
1. The attribute which the state possesses, of being in cer-
tain cases the mo^t authoritative expression of the social will,
is generally spoken of by writers on political science as that of
sovereignty. It is particularly in this field of social phenomena
that political science and social psychology have much of their
data in common. For this reason, no doubt, political writers
have been prone to express their views on the authority of the
state in psychological terms. In fact, in the writings of some
authors we find a more or less clearly conceived psychological
theory of the state. But on the whole the history of the theory of
sovereignty reveals much confusion and vagueness, largely on
account of an inadequate social psychology.
2. There are two facts of social psychology which are basic
to an understanding of this subject: one is the reality of the
individual will and the other is the reality of the social will.
An attempt has been made in the preceding pages to show that
the reciprocal interaction of individual minds in a community
is a collective process having certain definite features; that
only in virtue of such interaction is it possible for the individual
mind to come to even a slight realization of its own powers; but
that although so far as its total history is concerned, continuous
social contact is implied, there is yet an apperceptive organi-
zation of experience which renders it relatively independent of
immediate stimulation. Now there are some things in the
interaction of individual minds which lead to nothing very defi-
nite along the line of conduct, such as vague sentiments and
various forms of emotional excitement. So long as such is the
case the public mind is in a state of confusion which continues
until in the process of interaction some individual mind is reached
in which are aroused apperceptive activities that issue in a clear
THE SOCIAL WILL 8l
idea or concept, and in this way convert a vague emotional
tendency into a volitional process that is social in its scope. In
other words an individual personality is necessary to give artic-
ulate expression to social processes of thought and feeling before
any definite resolution of conflicts in the social mind is possible.
Once that a specific conception emerges at a point in the social
medium, provided it satisfies existing mental conditions, it is
forthwith incorporated by some system in the social mind. This
** particularizing" function of the individual personality, to use
a term of Professor Baldwin's, seems to be the truth in the con-
tention of certain writers that sovereignty resides always in a
determinate body of persons; and so far as this is the case, they
have shown deeper insight into the constitution of society than
others who hold to an extreme universalism that does away once
for all with all individual determination.^ But it is possible
to conceive the independence of this particular body of persons
in too absolute a manner. Atomism in psychology and ethics
leads readily to atomism in political philosophy, in accordance
with which sovereignty is likely to be thought of too much as
physical coercion, commanding obedience through the motive
of fear with but little regard to the real needs of human nature
which a political order satisfies. The particular personality
through which social desire comes to articulate utterance, is an
outgrowth of the social life and can be considered as the source
of authority only in the relative sense that it makes an individual
contribution to a social tendency by converting the latter into
a more or less clearly defined movement.
3. The form of social control which writers on political
philosophy have in mind when speaking of sovereignty, is one
which comes rather late in the history of society. It presup-
poses a consciousness in which society has arrived at some recog-
nition of itself as a psychic entity, with defined concepts of
values in the various spheres of life, and some regularly consti-
tuted and authoritative means of putting into execution its pref-
erences. The volitional processes in which society declares its
will through the mechanism of the law, are complexes which in
their totality are consciously constituted with respect to par-
^ The Austinians, e.g., in contrast to the French "Doctrinaires."
82 EDWIN ANDREW HATDEN.
ticular conflicts, yet contain parts which are automatic and
stable. Many of these automatic connections have had a long
social history, and were developed by association in the period
of the ascendancy of custom. These factors, which the usual
legal discussions overlook, are of fundamental importance in a
psychological analysis of the motives of political obedience.
4. It has frequently happened in the history of a people that
a partial social will — ^the will of some social group — became
ascendant in a universe of social relations and constrained the
great mass of individual wills through fear into certain unwel-
come modes of action. Such constraint, however, has usually
not extended to all departments of social life, but only to certain
external acts the performance of which left the deep undercur-
rent of social life undisturbed. The vast stream of social senti-
ment, desire, hope and ambition cannot be completely focalized
in any particular body of determinate persons. For this reason
despotisms even the most pronounced usually leave their sub-
jects free in the general course of events in their domestic and
religious life. Its constraint is felt chiefly in the levying of
tribute and impressing in the military service. In other spheres
the obedience of the people is due to sentiments and feelings of
a pervasive nature that reside rather in the consciousness of
society as a whole than in any one individual mind to the
exclusion of others. So far, however, as these sentiments and
feelings do come to clearer expression in some personalities than
in others, such personalities are centers of influence not because
of a power of compulsory subordination which they possess, but
because of their representative function in some association.
The influence which they wield may at times constrain indi-
vidual wills, relatively few in number, to acts that they would
not do of their own volition; but on the whole the influence
is possible simply because the people feel it to confirm and
strengthen their habitual sentiments and beliefs. Authority,
so far as it is despotic, i. e., so far as it merely represents the
will of a single person, or a class, and commands obedience
through compulsion — acts as a block to the flow of mental life
at the points of constraint, but the resulting mental conflict
does not lead to a healthy apperceptive activity in which mental
THE SOCIAL WILL. 83
systems are united into a more comprehensive and unified sys-
tem, but simply to an arrest that means aversion. It is imma-
terial whether the despotism proceeds from a native or ahen
source, for the mental results are the same. Both attain their
ends by inciting the public mind to acts that do not flow freely
from its inner constitution. There is a suppression of sentiments
and feelings which under conditions of freedom would operate
to inhibit or perform certain acts. Extended to all departments
of life as a real principle of control, compulsory subordination
would ruin all creative mental activity on account of the
encroachment upon apperception by the habits of servility in
thought which are developed through mere compliance with
external authority. The body may become the mere passive
instrument of physical force, but the personality never, for the
very condition of its manifestation has been removed.
5. The ascendancy of the political power may be less coercive
and in more intimate contact with the social personality if it
exercises its will through the preformed disposition of society
which is mechanized in the ancient rights and customs. The
supremacy of English power in India furnishes an admirable
example of this more organic form of political and social contact.
According to Bryce,^ the English administrators in the time
of Clive and Warren Hastings, found in the native law, "First,
a large and elaborate system of Inheritance and Family Law.
. Secondly, a large mass of customs relating to the
occupation and use of land and of various rights concerned with
tillage and pasturage, including water-rights, rights of soil-accre-
tion on the banks of rivers, and forest rights Thirdly,
a body of customs, according to our ideas comparatively scanty
and undeveloped, but still important, relating to the transfer
and pledging of property, and to contracts, especially commer-
cial contracts Fourthly, certain penal rules drawn
from Musulman law and more or less enforced by Musulman
princes.'' *'In this state of facts the British officials took the
line which practical men, having their hands full of other work,
would naturally take, viz: the line of least resistance. They
^ Studies in History and Jurisprudence^ p. 98.
84 EDWIN ANDREW HATDEN.
accepted and carried on what they found. Where there was
native law, they appHed it, Musulman law to Musulmans,
Hindu law to Hindus, and in the few places where they were to
be found, Parsi law to Parsis, Jain law to Jains. "^ Since that
time many acts have been passed codifying and amending the
native law, so that as a net result we have "the new stream of
united law which has its source in the codifying Acts ''2 and
"the various older streams of law, each representing a religion. "
Thus an ascendancy like that of British power in India, while
exercising but little direct coercion, really touches the life of the
subject people in a more vital manner than a military despotism
would. Instead of shrinking the mental life at the points of
contact by an inhibitive and contractile motive like fear, it really
amplifies it by giving greater stability and certainty to the flow
of native sentiment and feeling. English administration and
legislation has caused most changes in the native law in those
spheres where the native law was either meager or where because
of its peculiar nature it was comparatively flexible. The modi-
fication has been relatively superficial in those social relations
rooted in deep habits and strong sentiments.
6. In passing to cases where the law and the power that
enforces it are equally indigenous to the particular society;
where the law has had a slow and continuous growth through
trial and experiment in which the people themselves have played
an important role, we find the points of contact between the
legal institutions and the national character correspondingly
multiplied. There is here also a determinate person or body
of persons to whom in the first instance the making and enforc-
ing of laws is due; but here the ascendancy is due more than
in the other instances to the fact that the organized personality
of society finds on the whole an adequate expression of its will
through the instrumentality of such a body. Political power is
now a force that is concerned in the maintenance and protec-
tion of rights that meet general approval; in other words, with
the maintenance of general social conditions that are necessary
* Bryce, op. cit.y p. 99.
^ Ihid., p. 105.
THE SOCIAL WILL. 85
to a certain freedom of volition. When a power of this sort
exists, which " prescribes forms and obhgations to all minor
purposive associations, and shapes the social composition,"^ it
may be fitly described as the organ of the social will, since it is
the medium through which habits and desires of the social mind
come to expression in an authoritative way, i. e., in a way that
commands the usual obedience of individual wills.
7. While the usual flow of social thought and feeHng comes
to regular and definite expression in the declarations of a deter-
minate body of persons, in time of serious disturbance it
frequently happens that no particular body of persons can be
pointed out as the one in which ultimate authority actually
resides. There is then no social will. Social volition has become
merely social emotion; and it would be as rational to apply the
term will to the ravings and fury of a madman as to the public
mind in a state of excitement. If there is any collective tend-
ency discernible in social thought and feeling, it arises from the
fact that some of the various motives competing in the public
mind through their massiveness and strength turn the tide of
social emotion in a particular direction. Under such conditions
there is no organized public sentiment and no particular will
through which the social will declares itself The usual motives
of obedience which at other times unite to produce a conscious-
ness of a commonweal, are out of function. The effect of such
a state of the public mind is seen objectively in the suspension
of private rights by which individual volition enjoys an amount
of freedom and encouragement otherwise impossible. Some
order emerges from this confusion when the points of conflict
become clearly defined, and society divides into two contending
parties, each having a degree of organization. There is now
no soveriegn power, for there is properly no social will in the
sense of an organized volitional process growing out of the
controlled interplay of individual minds. What we really have
is a division of the social personality with the mental processes
slightly organized about two competing centers. When society
is thus divided into two hostile camps, there is usually a con-
^Giddings: Principles of Sociology y p. 174, ed. 1896.
86 EDWIN ANDREW HATDEN.
siderable contraction in the volume of national life; for com-
merce and other pursuits are partially paralyzed. Within the
ranks of each party we see something of control and obedience:
each party has a leader, a definite body of persons to which
the rank and file render obedience — an obedience which at
times is far removed from servility, being inspired by a keen
sense of duty and a rational idea of common welfare and of the
interests at stake. But still it is true that private rights are
insecure under such conditions, even within the ranks of each
party, so that the individual is frequently compelled to do
things against his own inclinations, no matter how great may
be his general sympathy for the cause he defends. Fear comes
into the foreground of consciousness as one of the motives of
obedience at times of martial control. When the mental conflict
in the social mind is brought to an issue, the emotional excite-
ment abates, desire is again subordinated to rational control,
and a supreme social will once more emerges, having a definite
personal medium for the enforcement of its declarations. The
private rights, temporarily abridged, are restored, giving to the
individual will its former, and perhapts greater, range of free-
dom and activity. Now we have a personal agency exercising
supreme coercive power when necessary within the limits of a
system of public and private rights. But the authorized agency
of the state, viz: the government, has a personality in some
degree its own, and for this reason does not usually act as a
mere neutral medium of expression. Frequently its conduct is
dictated by egoistic and personal rather than legal and social
motives. Frequently too it acts as the molder of public opinion,
awakening the social consciousness to new matters of general
interest and importance so that the organ of sovereignty must
be looked upon as a social group having a will in a measure
peculiar to itself. It thus comes about that the sovereign power
may enforce laws which stand in conflict with the social will,
at variance with the general system of rights which guarantee
the individual freedom and protection in his ordinary pursuits.
8. The particular way in which the forces of social life select
the membership of the governing body, seems to stand in no
necessary relation to individual freedom — at best only remotely
THE SOCIAL WILL. 87
SO. The opinion that a law in order to be an expression of the
social will must have the sanction of a majority ballot, rests
upon a superficial view of things. The arts of the demagogue
may so push private interests upon the attention of the public
that a majority opinion upon the matter in hand, as recorded
in a general ballot, does not express a rational volition, but
simply the desire of a crowd acting under suggestion; while the
decision of a select body, even if its membership is hereditary,
may more truly reflect the real will of society, in that it accords
faithfully with the spirit of the total system of public and private
rights obtaining under rational conditions. The essential thing
is that the governing body shall be responsive to the hopes,
sentiments and desires of the people as these organize them-
selves into definite and urgent opinions. That the governing
body may maintain its organic connection with the social order,
true to the mission it has of maintaining rights and enforcing
obligations, some surety beyond its condescension and good will
is necessary. There must be institutional limitations that act
as a powerful restraint upon the excesses of the will of the sov-
ereign power, making difficult any concerted action toward the
usurpation of authority and keeping the people in an attitude
defensive of their rights. Provided the individual has in certain
spheres of life that freedom of volition necessary to creative
mental activity, a people may rise to a considerable plane of
culture though the legislative and administrative functions of
the state are practically in the hands of an hereditary class.
Custom generally acts as a sufficient protection against the com-
plete abrogation of a right, but is a weak security against the
invasion of the right so far as isolated individuals are concerned.
But something more than this is imperative, if the state is tos
be an efficient association in realizing the moral possibilities of \
man: rights must be so secure that the humblest citizen can )
command the aid of the state in his defense with as little effort"^
as the most influential. The modern system of representative )
government by which the personnel of the law-making body is
in part directly determined by the choice of the people, hasi
much to commend it as a limitation to despotic authority. It'
is the most effective instrument yet devised for converting public
EDWIN ANDREW HAYDEN.
opinion into a practical force in political control, besides being
a discipline of the highest order in training people into habits
of independence and self-reliance.
9. Between political and other social institutions history
reveals a delicate interdependence: universally societies having
a high mental organization as externally manifest in the crea-
tions of art, science, and industry, are states of corresponding
political development, guaranteeing rights and engaging in lines
of endeavor that make for the moral and spiritual perfection
of man. Then law is something more than a rule imposed by
an external authority; it is a system of rights collaborated by the
nation in the mental conflict that on the one hand gives a social
will capable of realizing certain collective aims and on the other
an individual will organizing social experiences in its own way.
The struggle has been more of a conflict between the partial
wills of antagonistic social groups than between individual
minds of the same social level. The cleavage in the struggle
has usually begun in the upper social ranks of superior initia-
tive, working an alignment on this side or that side of the point
at issue as it moved downward through the various strata of
social life. A vast upheaval from the social depths can occur
only in the relatively late stages of social history, when a vigor-
ous interchange of thought and feeling is going on among and
between social classes. Some great leader may then emerge
from the commons to voice their demands in tones that compel
an extension of their legal and political rights and make the
state still more the servant of the humble citizen in protecting
his now greater sphere of freedom from invasion.
THE SOCIAL WILL. 89
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INDEX.
Adoption, ceremony of: extends the universe of moral feeling, 58.
Animals; mind of, 3-5; as systems of energy, 11.
Apperception: relation of, to invention, 32-34; to association, 30.
Art: a form of mental expression, 8.
Attention: see apperception, also mental systems.
Attitudes of the self toward experience: 47-49.
Bagehot: on emotion of conviction, 17; on authority and discussion, 45.
Baldwin: referred to, 22; on "particularizing" function of the individual mind,
81.
Belief or Beliefs: as a mental process, 16-20; differs from knowledge, 16; conflict
in, 17; in relation to the imagination, 17, 18; is a native attitude of mind,
19; effect on life and of life on it, 19; outgrown, 19; in relation to the will,
20-27; fixed, function of, 26; see also systematization of belief.
Bentley: on memory image, 4.
Bethe: on instinct, 3.
Bryce, James: quoted, 23, 83, 84; referred to, 3.
Caste-morality: nature of, 59.
Child: mind of, 9.
Civilized mind: nature of, 9.
Coercion: eflfects of, on mental life, 82, 83.
Commonweal: concept of, changes in course of history, 78-79.
Commercial Intercourse: in relation to social ideals, 59.
Consciousness: social, i-io.
Custom: " change of purpose in," 32; morality of, 75; relation to self-conscious-
ness, 71; protects rights, Sy.
Darwin: theory of natural selection, 33; circumspection of, 40.
Degeneracy: difference between individual and social, 62.
Deliberation: collective, 21-23.
Desire: nature of, 11-16; representation in, 13; theoretical, 13; conflict in, 14;
universe of, 15; modified by history, 15, 16; in relation to the will, 20-27.
Delusions: in social mind, not symptomatic of social decay, 62.
Economy: industrial, rests on national sentiment, 66.
Effort: law of, 57; see also conflict.
Egoism: in times of social disorder, 61; contractile nature of, 78.
Emotion: in the social mind, 63, 64.
Energy: systems of, 10.
Environment: social, as a source of mental impressions, 5.
Evil: moral, nature of, 51-53.
Experience: physical and psychological view of, 10.
Family: center of feeling, 57.
Faith: see belief.
Fear: as a motive in political control, 84.
92 INDEX.
Feeling: impersonal, 47; ethical, social universes to which attached, 58; personal
in economic sphere, 64.
Freedom: desire for, a social desire, 74-75; relation of to government, 86-88.
Geography: a social discipline, 10.
Gesture-language, 7.
Giddings: referred to, 22; on state, 85.
Government: in relation to freedom, 86; responsive to public opinion; limits
to the function of, 86, 87.
Habit: in relation to instinct, 5; in social volition, 25, 26; in private association
transferred to public, 75, 76.
Heredity: in child; 9; limits the idealization of desire, 12; see also instinct.
Ideas: spread of, checked by indifference or opposition, 41.
Ideals: univers^ of, 48; in relation to belief, 49; moral, variation in, 54, 55; lim-
ited by heiredity, 54; ascendancy, conditioned by the set of the public mind,
55; sustained by practical activities, 55; of the social life, 55, 56; appercep-
tive control in, 56; national, interconnected with egoistic motives in devel-
opment of state, 78,
Ignorance: resists the spread of ideas, 42; gives a pedagogical economy, 57.
Imitation: psychological nature\of, 30-33.
Image: mental, genetic function of, 4.
Inhibition: in social mind, 28.
Instinct: nature of, 3.
Institutions: political, in relation to social development, 88.
Intermixtures of cultures : extends the universe of moral ideals, 59.
Intercourse: universe of, personal feeling in, 47, 48.
Interpretation: judicial, legislative function of, 68.
James, Professor: referred to, 19.
Judge: personality of, as a medium of law, 67.
Knox: Bagehot on temperament of, 17.
Language: function of, 6 fF.
Law: sentiment of, 63-79; as constraint of the individual by social will, 65;
crime conflicts with the consciousness of, 65; liberal construction of, 67;
should correspond with the general sentiment of justice, 68; consciousness
of, varies in the different social groups, 68; British in India, 83, 84;
struggle for, begins in the upper social ranks, 88.
Le Bon : on imagination of crowds, 35.
Life and faith, 19.
Louis XIV: reign of, 30.
Loyola: Bagehot on temperament of, 19.
Mania: moral feeling in, 61.
Maudsley: on moral feeling, 62.
MelanchoHa: moral feeling in, 61.
Memory: contents of, modified by history, 18.
Mental systems: unfoldment of, in social mind, 34; conditions of the vigor of,
35 J 38; two kinds, perceptual and conceptual, 38; development of, 39;
flexibility of, 40; conflict of, in social mind, 40-45; conflict of, in moral
right, 53; conflict of, in legal right, -J^, 74.
Morgan : on universe of discourse, 33.
Newton: corpuscular theory of light, 8,40; theory of gravitation, 39.
INDEX
93
Nature: primitive idea of, 6.
Opposition: resists the spread of ideas, 41, 42; see also conflict.
Personalism, 9.
Personality: social, 11-27; i^^^^ of social, 55-58; juristic conception of, 64; divi-
sion of, suspends sovereignty, 85.
Punishment: moral effect of, 65; by state, 72.
Reaction to stimuH: by plants and animals, 11.
Representations: in animal mind, 4.
Right, legal: stability of, 35; assertion of, by individual, a moral necessity, 69;
energy of the feeling of, 69-71; security of, depends on the state, 71,72;
mental conflict in the development of, 73,74; moral, 47-62, see ideals.
Roman law: flexibility of, 40.
Savages: mind of, 6.
Selection: natural, 3,33; of social ideals, 54.
Self: attitudes of, toward experience, 47-49; ideal of, social, 49, 50; ethical, nature
of, 50-52.
Self-consciousness: in the mythologic mind, 10; in belief, 17; unfoldment of,
in moral conflict, 48.
State: social will expressed in, 23; Bryce on the work of the, 23; personality of,
23; as an undertaker of social enterprise, 66; ends of, 66; as a coercive
power, 74, 79; organized expression of humanity, 79.
Slaves: Athenian, 5.
Sovereignty: doctrine of, 80-88; reality of the individual will and of the social
will in the fact of, 80, 81 ; universalism in the theory of, 81; presupposes the
idea of law in the social mind, 81; as coercion, 82,83; as authority
exercised according to some standard of right, by an alien power, 83, 84; by
by a native power, 84; suspension of, 85, 86.
Spencer: on insect communities as expanded families, i; referred to, 6.
Stout: on habit, 25; on belief as a limitation of activity, 17.
Tarde: referred to, 1 1 ; on desire and environment, 15; on ephemeral beliefs, 26.
Thorndike: on free ideas in the animal mind, 4.
Toleration : in social strife, 44, 45.
Tribal group: as the primordial universe of ethical obligation, 57.
Values, moral: changed by openness of the mind to social suggestion, 60; confu-
sion of, in times of new endeavors, 61.
Vote, public: does not necessarily express the social will, 86-87.
Verdicts, judicial: checks in, 68.
Wallace, A, R.: natural selection, 33.
Will: belief and desire in relation to, 20-27; coordinates desire and belief in a
social process, 20-21; individual wills connected in a total will, 21; ration-
ality of, depends in part on the number interacting, 21; collective delib-
eration possible, 21-23; expressed in the state, 23, 24; habit in social, 25, 26;
lack of apperceptive control in, 26, 27; moral, in relation to the imagination,
51; in moral conflict, 52; aberration of individual, 52,53; aims at universal
ends, 100; social will constrains the individual through the law, 65; social
will encourages the individual through the law, 66.
Witchcraft: delusion at Salem, 62.
Wundt: on sexual communities, 2; on religious desire, 15; on change of purpose
in custom, 31.
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