Chapter XII Freedom
The Meaning of Freedom—Freedom and Discipline—Freedom as a Phase of the Social Order—Freedom Involves Incidental Strain and Degeneracy.
Goethe remarks in his Autobiography107 that the word freedom has so fair a sound that we cannot do without it even though it designate an error. Certainly it is a word inseparable from our higher sentiments, and if, in its popular use at the present day, it has no precise meaning, there is so much the more reason why we should try to give it one, and to continue its use as a symbol of something that mankind cherishes and strives for.
The common notion of freedom is negative, that is, it is a notion of the absence of constraint. Starting with the popular individualistic view of things, the social order is thought of as something apart from, and more or less a hinderance to, a man’s natural development. There is an assumption that an ordinary person is self-sufficient in most respects, and will do very well if he is only left alone. But there is, of course, no such thing as the absence of restraint, in the sense of social limitations; man has no existence apart from a social order, and can develop his personality only through the social order, and in the same degree that it is developed. A freedom consisting in the removal of limiting conditions is inconceivable. If the word is to have any definite meaning in sociology, it must therefore be separated from the idea of a fundamental opposition between society and the individual, and made to signify something that is both individual and social. To do this it is not necessary to do any great violence to accepted ideas of a practical sort; since it is rather in theory than in application that the popular view is objectionable. A sociological interpretation of freedom should take away nothing worth keeping from our traditional conception of it, and may add something in the way of breadth, clearness, and productiveness.
The definition of freedom naturally arising from the chapters that have gone before is perhaps this: that it is opportunity for right development, for development in accordance with the progressive ideal of life that we have in conscience. A child comes into the world with an outfit of vague tendencies, for all definite unfolding of which he is dependent upon social conditions. If cast away alone on a desert island he would, supposing that he succeeded in living at all, never attain a real humanity, would never know speech, or social sentiment, or any complex thought. On the other hand, if all his surroundings are from the first such as to favor the enlargement and enrichment of his life, he may attain the fullest development possible to him in the actual state of the world. In so far as the social conditions have this favoring action upon him he may be said to be free. And so every person, at every stage of his growth, is free or unfree in proportion as he does or does not find himself in the midst of conditions conducive to full and harmonious personal development. Thinking in this way we do not regard the individual as separable from the social order as a whole, but we do regard him as capable of occupying any one of an indefinite number of positions within that order, some of them more suitable to him than others.
No doubt there are elements of vagueness in this conception. What is full and harmonious personal development? What is the right, the opportunity to achieve which is freedom? The possibilities of development are infinitely various, and unimaginable until they begin to be realized, so that it would appear that our notion gives us nothing definite to go by after all. This is largely true: development cannot be defined, either for the race or for individuals, but is and must remain an ideal, of which we can get only partial and shifting glimpses. In fact, we should cease to think of freedom as something definite and final, that can be grasped and held fast once for all, and learn to regard it as a line of advance, something progressively appearing out of the invisible and defining itself, like the forms of a mountain up which one is climbing in a mist. This vagueness and incompleteness are only what we meet in every direction when we attempt to define our ideals. What is progress? What is right? What is beauty? What is truth? The endeavor to produce unmistakable and final definitions of these things is now, I suppose, given up, and we have come to recognize that the good, in all its forms, is evolved rather than achieved, is a process rather than a state.
The best definition of freedom is perhaps nothing other than the most helpful way of thinking about it; and it seems to me that the most helpful way of thinking about it is to regard it in the light of the contrast between what a man is and what he might be, as our experience of life enables us to imagine the two states. Ideas of this sort are suggested by defining freedom as opportunity, and their tendency is to stimulate and direct practical endeavor. If the word helps us to realize, for instance, that it is possible to make healthy, intelligent, and hopeful children out of those that are now sickly, dull, and unhappy, so much the better. On the other hand, the definition of it as letting people alone, well enough suited, perhaps, to an over-governed state of society, does not seem especially pertinent to our time and country.
We have always been taught by philosophy that the various forms of the good were merely different views of the same thing, and this idea is certainly applicable to such notions as those of freedom, progress, and right. Thus freedom may be regarded as merely the individual aspect of progress, the two being related as the individual and the social order were asserted to be in the first chapter, and no more distinct or separable. If instead of contrasting what a particular man is with what he might be, we do the same for mankind as a whole, we have the notion of progress. Progress which does not involve liberation is evidently no progress at all; and, on the other hand, a freedom that is not part of the general onward movement of society is not free in the largest sense. Again, any practicable idea of freedom must connect it with some standard of right, in which, like opposing claims in a clearing-house, the divergent tendencies of each person, and of different persons, are disciplined and reconciled. The wrong is the unfree; it is that which tends, on the whole, to restrict personal development. It is no contribution to freedom to turn loose the insane or the criminal, or to allow children to run on the streets instead of going to school. The only test of all these things—of right, freedom, progress, and the like—is the instructed conscience; just as the only test of beauty is a trained æsthetic sense, which is a mental conclusion of much the same sort as conscience.
So far as discipline is concerned, freedom means not its absence but the use of higher and more rational forms as contrasted with those that are lower or less rational. A free discipline controls the individual by appealing to his reason and conscience, and therefore to his self-respect; while an unfree control works upon some lower phase of the mind, and so tends to degrade him. It is freedom to be disciplined in as rational a manner as you are fit for.
Thus freedom is relative to the particular persons and states who are to enjoy it, some individuals within any society, and some societies as wholes, being capable of a higher sort of response than others. In the family, it implies the substitution, so far as practicable, of familiarity and moral suasion for distance and the rod; in government the growth of public opinion and education as compared with autocracy and the military and police functions; in the church, the decline of dogma, form, the fear of hell and hypnotic conversion, relatively to intelligence, sympathy, and good works. But any relaxation of lower forms of discipline which is not supplied by higher, which tends, on the whole, to confusion rather than reorganization, is not in the way of real freedom. The question what this is is always one that is relative to the actual situation, never one that can be absolutely or abstractly answered. Freedom can be increased only in connection with the increase of sympathy, intelligence, and self-control in individuals.
The social order is antithetical to freedom only in so far as it is a bad one. Freedom can exist only in and through a social order, and must be increased by all the healthy growth of the latter. It is only in a large and complex social system that any advanced degree of it is possible, because nothing else can supply the multifarious opportunities by means of which all sorts of persons can work out a congenial development through the choice of influences.
In so far as we have freedom in the United States at the present time, in what does it consist? Evidently, it seems to me, in the access to a great number and variety of influences by whose progressive selection and assimilation a child may become, within vague limits set by the general state of our society, the best that he is naturally fitted to become. It consists, to begin with infancy, in a good family life, in intelligent nurture and training, adapted to the special traits of character which every child manifests from the first week of life. Then it involves good schooling, admitting the child through books and teachers to a rich selection from the accumulated influences of the best minds of the past. Free technical and professional education, so far as it exists, contributes to it, also the facility of travel, bringing him in contact with significant persons from all over the world; public libraries, magazines, good newspapers, and so on. Whatever enlarges his field of selection without permanently confusing him adds to his liberty. In fact, institutions—government, churches, industries, and the like—have properly no other function than to contribute to human freedom; and in so far as they fail, on the whole, to perform this function, they are wrong and need reconstruction.
Although a high degree of freedom can exist only through a complex social order, it by no means follows that every complex social order is free. On the contrary, it has more often been true in the past that very large and intricately organized states, like the Roman Empire, were constructed on a comparatively mechanical or unfree principle. And in our own time a vast and complex empire, like Russia or China, may be less free than the simplest English-speaking colony. There are serious objections to identifying progress, as Herbert Spencer sometimes appears to do, with the mere differentiation and co-ordination of social functions. But the example of the United States, which is perhaps on the whole the most intricately differentiated and co-ordinated state that ever existed, shows that complexity is not inconsistent with freedom. To enter fully into this matter would require a more careful examination of the institutional aspect of life than I wish to undertake at present; but I hold that the possibility of organizing large and complex societies on a free principle depends upon the quickness and facility of communication, and so has come to exist only in recent times. The great states of earlier history were necessarily somewhat mechanical in structure.
It happens from time to time in every complex and active society, that certain persons feel the complexity and insistence as a tangle, and seek freedom in retirement, as Thoreau sought it at Walden Pond. They do not, however, in this manner escape from the social institutions of their time, nor do they really mean to do so; what they gain, if they are successful, is a saner relation to them. Thoreau in his hut remained as truly a member of society, as dependent for suggestion upon his books, his friends, and his personal memories, and upon verbal expression for his sense of self, as did Emerson in Concord or Lowell in Cambridge; and I imagine that if he had cared to discuss the matter he would have admitted that this was the case. Indeed, the idea of Thoreau as a recluse was not, I think, his own idea, but has been attached to him by superficial observers of his life. Although he was a dissenter from the state and the church of his time, his career would have been impossible without those institutions, without Harvard College, for instance, which was a joint product of the two. He worked out his personal development through congenial influences selected from the life of his time, very much as others do. He simply had peculiar tendencies which he developed in a peculiar way, especially by avoiding a gregarious mode of life unsuited to his temperament. He was free through the social order, not outside of it, and the same may be said of Edward Fitzgerald and other seclusive spirits. No doubt the commonplace life of the day is a sort of slavery for many sensitive minds that have not, like these, the resolution to escape from it into a calmer and broader atmosphere.
Since freedom is not a fixed thing that can be grasped and held once for all, but a growth, any particular society, such as our own, always appears partly free and partly unfree. In so far as it favors, in every child, the development of his highest possibilities, it is free, but where it falls short of this it is not. So far as children are ill-nurtured or ill-taught, as family training is bad, the schools inefficient, the local government ill-administered, public libraries lacking, or private associations for various sorts of culture deficient, in so far the people are unfree. A child born in a slum, brought up in a demoralized family, and put at some confining and mentally deadening work when ten or twelve years old, is no more free to be healthy, wise, and moral than a Chinese child is free to read Shakespeare. Every social ill involves the enslavement of individuals.
This idea of freedom is quite in accord with a general, though vague, sentiment among us; it is an idea of fair play, of giving everyone a chance; and nothing arouses more general and active indignation among our people than the belief that someone or some class is not getting a fair chance. There seems, however, to be too great complacency in the way in which the present state of things is interpreted, a tendency to assume that freedom has been achieved once for all by the Declaration of Independence and popular suffrage, and that little remains but to let each person realize the general blessing to the best of his ability. It is well to recognize that the freedom which we nominally worship is never more than partly achieved, and is every day threatened by new encroachments, that the right to vote is only one phase of it, and possibly, under present conditions, not the most important phase, and that we can maintain and increase it only by a sober and determined application of our best thought and endeavor. Those lines of Lowell’s “Commemoration Ode” are always applicable:
“—the soft Ideal that we wooed
Confronts us fiercely, foe-beset, pursued,
And cries reproachful: Was it then my praise,
And not myself was loved? Prove now thy truth.
I claim of thee the promise of thy youth.”
In our view of freedom we have a right to survey all times and countries and from them form for our own social order an ideal condition, which shall offer to each individual all the encouragements to growth and culture that the world has ever or anywhere enjoyed. Any narrowness or lack of symmetry in life in general is reflected in the contraction or warping of personal development, and so constitutes a lack of freedom. The social order should not exaggerate one or a few aspects of human nature at the expense of others, but extend its invitations to all our higher tendencies. Thus the excessive preoccupation of the nineteenth century with material production and physical science may be regarded as a partial enslavement of the spiritual and æsthetic sides of humanity, from which we are now struggling to escape. The freedom of the future must, it would seem, call more and more for a various, rich, and tolerant environment, in which all sorts of persons may build themselves up by selective development. The day for any sort of dogmatism and coercive uniformity appears to be past, and it will be practicable to leave people more and more to control by a conscience reflecting the moral opinion of the group to which their inclination and capacity attach them.
The substitution of higher forms of control for lower, the offering more alternatives and trusting the mind to make a right selection, involves, of course, an increased moral strain upon individuals. Now this increase of moral strain is not in all cases exactly proportioned to the ability to bear it well; and when it is not well borne the effect upon character is more or less destructive, so that something in the way of degeneracy results.
Consequently every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom. This is very plainly to be seen at the present time, which is one, on the whole, of rapid increase of freedom. Family life and the condition of women and children have been growing freer and better, but along with this we have the increase of divorce and of spoiled children. Democracy in the state has its own peculiar evils, as we all know; and in the church the decay of dogmatism and unreasoning faith, a moral advance on the whole, has nevertheless caused a good many moral failures. In much the same way the enfranchisement of the negroes is believed to have caused an increase of insanity among them, and the growth of suicide in all countries seems to be due in part to the strain of a more complex society. It is not true, exactly, that freedom itself causes degeneracy, because if one is subjected to more strain than is good for him his real freedom is rather contracted than enlarged, but it should rather be said that any movement which has increase of freedom for its general effect can never be so regulated as to have only this effect, but is sure to act upon some in an opposite manner.
Nor is it reasonable to sit back and say that this incidental demoralization is inevitable, a fixed price of progress. On the contrary, although it can never be altogether dispensed with, it can be indefinitely reduced, and every social institution or influence that tends to adapt the stress of civilization to the strength of the individual does reduce it in some measure.
Notes
1. Also free will, determinism, egoism, and altruism, which involve, in my opinion, a kindred misconception.
2. It should easily be understood that one who agrees with what was said in the preceding chapter about the relation between society and the individual, can hardly entertain the question whether the individual will is free or externally determined. This question assumes as true what he holds to be false, namely that the particular aspect of mankind is separable from the collective aspect. The idea underlying it is that of an isolated fragment of life, the will, on the one hand, and some great mass of life, the environment, on the other; the question being which of these two antithetical forces shall be master. If one, then the will is free; if the other, then it is determined. It is as if each man’s mind were a castle besieged by an army, and the question were whether the army should make a breach and capture the occupants. It is hard to see how this way of conceiving the matter could arise from a direct observation of actual social relations. Take, for instance, the case of a member of Congress, or of any other group of reasoning, feeling, and mutually influencing creatures. Is he free in relation to the rest of the body or do they control him? The question appears senseless. He is influenced by them and also exerts an influence upon them. While he is certainly not apart from their power, he is controlled, if we use that word, through his own will and not in spite of it. And it seems plain enough that a relation similar in kind holds between the individual and the nation, or between the individual and humanity in general. If you think of human life as a whole and of each individual as a member and not a fragment, as, in my opinion, you must if you base your thoughts on a direct study of society and not upon metaphysical or theological preconceptions, the question whether the will is free or not is seen to be meaningless. The individual will appears to be a specialized part of the general life, more or less divergent from other parts and possibly contending with them; but this very divergence is a part of its function—just as a member of Congress serves that body by urging his particular opinions—and in a large view does not separate but unites it to life as a whole. It is often necessary to consider the individual with reference to his opposition to other persons, or to prevailing tendencies, and in so doing it may be convenient to speak of him as separate from and antithetical to the life about him: but this separateness and opposition are incidental, like the right hand pulling against the left to break a string, and there seems to be no sufficient warrant for extending it into a general or philosophical proposition.
There may be some sense in which the question of the freedom of the will is still of interest; but it seems to me that the student of social relations may well pass it by as one of those scholastic controversies which are settled, if at all, not by being decided one way or the other, but by becoming obsolete.
3. The imitativeness of children is stimulated by the imitativeness of parents. A baby cannot hit upon any sort of a noise, but the admiring family, eager for communication, will imitate it again and again, hoping to get a repetition. They are usually disappointed, but the exercise probably causes the child to notice the likeness of the sounds and so prepares the way for imitation. It is perhaps safe to say that up to the end of the first year the parents are more imitative than the child.
4. “In like manner any act or expression is a stimulus to the nerve-centres that perceive or understand it. Unless their action is inhibited by the will, or by counter-stimulation, they must discharge themselves in movements that more or less closely copy the originals.”—Giddings, Principles of Sociology, 110.
5. H. M. Stanley, The Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling, p. 53.
6. Goethe, in various places, contrasts modern art and literature with those of the Greeks in respect to the fact that the former express individual characteristics, the latter those of a race and an epoch. Thus in a letter to Schiller—No. 631 of the Goethe-Schiller correspondence—he says of Paradise Lost, “In the case of this poem, as with all modern works of art, it is in reality the individual that manifests itself that awakens the interest.”
Can there be some illusion mixed with the truth of this idea? Is it not the case that the nearer a thing is to our habit of thought the more clearly we see the individual, and the more vaguely, if at all, the universal? And would not an ancient Greek, perhaps, have seen as much of what was peculiar to each artist, and as little of what was common to all, as we do in a writer of our own time? The principle is much the same as that which makes all Chinamen look pretty much alike to us: we see the type because it is so different from what we are used to, but only one who lives within it can fully perceive the differences among individuals.
7. See the latter chapters of his Psychology of Suggestion.
8. See Harper’s Magazine, vol. 79, p. 770.
9. See The American Commonwealth, vol. ii., p. 705.
10. Memoirs of U. S. Grant, vol. i., p. 344.
11. See his Primitive Culture, vol. ii., p. 372.
12. K. C. Moore, The Mental Development of a Child, p. 37.
13. The Senses and the Will, p. 295.
14. See his First Three Years of Childhood, p. 13.
15. Oxenford’s Translation, vol. i., p. 501.
16. See his Essay on Vanity.
17. Early Spring in Massachusetts, p. 232.
18. The First Three Years of Childhood, p. 77.
19. See his Biographical Sketch of an Infant, Mind, vol. ii., p. 289.
20. A good way to interpret a man’s face is to ask oneself how he would look saying “I” in an emphatic manner. This seems to help the imagination in grasping what is most essential and characteristic in him.
21. Only four words—“heart,” “love,” “man,” “world”—take up more space in the index of “Familiar Quotations” than “eye.”
22. On the fear of (imaginary) eyes see G. Stanley Hall’s study of Fear in The American Journal of Psychology, vol. 8, p. 147.
23. Two apparently opposite views are current as to what style is. One regards it as the distinctive or characteristic in expression, that which marks off a writer or other artist from all the rest; according to the other, style is mastery over the common medium of expression, as language or the technique of painting or sculpture. These are not so inconsistent as they seem. Good style is both; that is, a significant personality expressed in a workmanlike manner.
24. P. 493.
25. With me, at least, this is the case. Some whom I have consulted find that certain sentiments—for instance, pity—may be directly suggested by the word, without the mediation of a personal symbol. This hardly affects the argument, as it will not be doubted that the sentiment was in its inception associated with a personal symbol.
26. This idea that social persons are not mutually exclusive but composed largely of common elements is implied in Professor William James’s doctrine of the Social Self and set forth at more length in Professor James Mark Baldwin’s Social and Ethical Interpretations of Mental Development. Like other students of social psychology I have received much instruction and even more helpful provocation from the latter brilliant and original work. To Professor James my obligation is perhaps greater still.
27. I distinguish, of course, between egotism, which is an English word of long standing, and egoism, which was, I believe, somewhat recently introduced by moralists to designate, in antithesis to altruism, certain theories or facts of ethics. I do not object to these words as names of theories, but as purporting to be names of facts of conduct I do, and have in mind more particularly their use by Herbert Spencer in his Principles of Psychology and other works. As used by Spencer they seem to me valid from a physiological standpoint only, and fallacious when employed to describe mental, social, or moral facts. The trouble is, as with his whole system, that the physiological aspect of life is expounded and assumed, apparently, to be the only aspect that science can consider. Having ventured to find fault with Spencer, I may be allowed to add that I have perhaps learned as much from him as from any other writer. If only his system did not appear at first quite so complete and final one might more easily remain loyal to it in spite of its deficiencies. But when these latter begin to appear its very completeness makes it seem a sort of a prison-wall which one must break down to get out.
I shall try to show the nature of egotism and selfishness in Chapter VI.
28. Some may question whether we can pity ourselves in this way. But it seems to me that we avoid self-pity only by not vividly imagining ourselves in a piteous plight; and that if we do so imagine ourselves the sentiment follows quite naturally.
29. Sympathy in the sense of compassion is a specific emotion or sentiment, and has nothing necessarily in common with sympathy in the sense of communion. It might be thought, perhaps, that compassion was one form of the sharing of feeling; but this appears not to be the case. The sharing of painful feeling may precede and cause compassion, but is not the same with it. When I feel sorry for a man in disgrace, it is, no doubt, in most cases, because I have imaginatively partaken of his humiliation; but my compassion for him is not the thing that is shared, but is something additional, a comment on the shared feeling. I may imagine how a suffering man feels—sympathize with him in that sense—and be moved not to pity but to disgust, contempt, or perhaps admiration. Our feeling makes all sorts of comments on the imagined feeling of others. Moreover it is not essential that there should be any real understanding in order that compassion may be felt. One may compassionate a worm squirming on a hook, or a fish, or even a tree. As between persons pity, while often a helpful and healing emotion, leading to kindly acts, is sometimes indicative of the absence of true sympathy. We all wish to be understood, at least in what we regard as our better aspects, but few of us wish to be pitied except in moments of weakness and discouragement. To accept pity is to confess that one falls below the healthy standard of vigor and self-help. While a real understanding of our deeper thought is rare and precious, pity is usually cheap, many people finding an easy pleasure in indulging it, as one may in the indulgence of grief, resentment, or almost any emotion. It is often felt by the person who is its object as a sort of an insult, a back-handed thrust at self-respect, the unkindest cut of all. For instance, as between richer and poorer classes in a free country a mutually respecting antagonism is much healthier than pity on the one hand and dependence on the other, and is, perhaps, the next best thing to fraternal feeling.
30. Much of what is ordinarily said in this connection indicates a confusion of the two ideas of specialization and isolation. These are not only different but, in what they imply, quite opposite and inconsistent. Speciality implies a whole to which the special part has a peculiar relation, while isolation implies that there is no whole.
31. See his Essay on Friendship.
32. Lewes’s Life of Goethe, vol. i, p. 282.
33. Goethe, Biographische Einzelheiten, Jacobi.
34. “I had to love him, for with him my life grew to such life as I had never known.”—Act 3, sc. 2.
35. Emerson, Address on The Method of Nature.
36. De Imitatione Christi, part iii., chap. 5, pars. 3 and 4.
37. “The words ME, then, and SELF, so far as they arouse feeling and connote emotional worth, are OBJECTIVE designations meaning ALL THE THINGS which have the power to produce in a stream of consciousness excitement of a certain peculiar sort.” Psychology, i., p. 319. A little earlier he says: “In its widest possible sense, however, a man’s self is the sum total of all he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses and yacht and bank account. All these things give him the same emotions.” Idem, p. 291.
So Wundt says of “Ich”: “Es ist ein Gefühl, nicht eine Vorstellung, wie es häufig genannt wird.” Grundriss der Psychologie 4. Auflage, S. 265.
38. It is, perhaps, to be thought of as a more general instinct, of which anger, etc., are differentiated forms, rather than as standing by itself.
39. Plumptre’s Sophocles, p. 352.
40. Psychology, i., p. 307.
41. “Only in man does man know himself; life alone teaches each one what he is.”—Goethe, Tasso, act 2, sc. 3.
42. John Addington Symonds, by H. F. Brown, vol. ii. p. 120.
43. Compare Some Aspects of the Early Sense of Self, American Journal of Psychology, ix., p 351.
44. Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, by F. Darwin, p. 27.
45. This sort of thing is very familiar to observers of children. See, for instance, Miss Shinn’s Notes on the Development of a Child, p. 153.
46. John Addington Symonds, by H. F. Brown, vol. 1, p. 63.
47. P. 70.
48. P. 74.
49. P. 120.
50. P. 125.
51. P. 348.
52. Attributed to Mme. de Staël.
53. I do not attempt to distinguish between these words, though there is a difference, ill defined however, in their meanings. As ordinarily used both designate a phase of self-assertion regarded as censurable, and this is all I mean by either.
54. Letters, p. 46.
55. Compare Stanley, The Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling, p. 271 et seq.
56. Wilhelm Meister’s Travels, Chap. XII., Carlyle’s Translation.
57. Quoted by Gummere, Germanic Origins, p. 266.
58. Œnone.
59. Travels, chap. 10, in Carlyle’s translation.
60. Stanley, The Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling, p. 280.
61. “Strive manfully; habit is subdued by habit. If you know how to dismiss men, they also will dismiss you, to do your own things.”—De Imitatione Christi, book i., chap. 21, par. 2.
62. De Imitatione Christi, book iii., chap. 23, par. 1.
63. Tulloch’s Pascal, p. 100.
64. See his History of European Morals, vol. ii., p. 369.
65. Perez, The First Three Years of Childhood, p. 66.
66. Mind, new series, vol. iv., p. 365.
67. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, pp. 303, 328.
68. See his essay on the Journal of the Brothers Goncourt.
69. See his Life and Letters, vol. ii., p. 192.
70. Compare Professor Simon N. Patten’s Theory of Social Forces, p. 135.
71. Thoreau, A Week, etc., p. 304.
72. Compare G. Stanley Hall’s study of Fear in the American Journal of Psychology, viii., p. 147.
73. The terrors of our dreams are caused largely by social imaginations. Thus Stevenson, in one of his letters, speaks of “my usual dreams of social miseries and misunderstandings and all sorts of crucifixions of the spirit.”—Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, i., p. 79.
74. Maine, Ancient Law, p. 62.
75. Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, v., 16, Carlyle’s Translation.
76. In reading studies of a particular aspect of life, like M. Tarde’s brilliant work, Les Lois de l’Imitation, it is well to remember that there are many such aspects, any of which, if expounded at length and in an interesting manner, might appear for the time to be of more importance than any other. I think that other phases of social activity, such, for instance, as communication, competition, differentiation, adaptation, idealization, have as good claims as imitation to be regarded as the social process, and that a book similar in character to M. Tarde’s might, perhaps, be written upon any one of them. The truth is that the real process is a multiform thing of which these are glimpses. They are good so long as we recognize that they are glimpses and use them to help out our perception of that many-sided whole which life is; but if they become doctrines they are objectionable.
The Struggle for Existence is another of these glimpses of life which just now seems to many the dominating fact of the universe, chiefly because attention has been fixed upon it by copious and interesting exposition. As it has had many predecessors in this place of importance, so doubtless it will have many successors.
77. Decline and Fall, vol. vii., p. 82; Milman-Smith edition.
78. Emerson, address on New England Reformers.
79. Psychology, vol. ii., p. 409.
80. See Darwin’s Life and Letters, by his son, vol. i., p. 47.
81. Emerson, New England Reformers.
82. Psychology, vol. ii., p. 314.
83. In Harper’s Magazine, vol. 78, p. 870.
84. Reminiscences quoted by Garland in McClure’s Magazine, April, 1897.
85. From a letter published in the newspapers at the time of the dedication of the Grant Monument, in April, 1897.
86. Mr. Howells remarks that “in Europe life is histrionic and dramatized, and that in America, except when it is trying to be European, it is direct and sincere.”—“Their Silver Wedding Journey,” Harper’s Magazine, September, 1899.
87. Related by W. H. Gibson, in Harper’s Magazine for May, 1897.
88. The fact that the Roman system meant organized ennui in thought, the impossibility of entertaining large and hopeful views of life, is strikingly brought out by the aid of contemporary documents in Dill’s Roman Society. Prisoners of a shrinking system, the later Romans had no outlook except toward the past. Anything onward and open in thought was inconceivable by them.
89. See Primitive Culture, by E. B. Tylor, chap. xiv.
90. J. A. Symonds, History of the Renaissance in Italy, The Fine Arts, p. 329. Hamerton has some interesting observations on mystery in art in his life of Turner, p. 352; also Ruskin in Modern Painters, part v., chaps. 4 and 5.
91. Tennyson, The Holy Grail.
92. See p. 248.
93. See his Instinct and Reason, p. 569.
94. M. J. Guyau, Esquisse d’une Morale sans Obligation ni Sanction, English translation, p. 93.
95. Idem, p. 149.
96. Idem, p. 87.
97. Idem, p. 82.
98. Studies of Childhood, p. 284.
99. See his First Three Years of Childhood, p. 287.
100. Psychology, vol. i., p. 315.
101. Emerson, History.
102. Idem, Spiritual Laws.
103. Amer. Jour. of Psychology, vol. 7, p. 86.
104. See pp. 101, 210, 226.
105. The Pathology of Mind, p. 425.
106. C. L. Dana, Nervous Diseases, p. 425.
107. Aus Meinem Leben, Book XI.
Used numbers for footnotes, placing them all at the end of the last chapter.