CHAPTER XXVI

THE LARGER INDIVIDUAL

The idea of mind, will, conscience, as prior to objects and behavior is a survival from the mediæval and Protestant conflict between soul and body, mind and world, ideal and fact. We do not start in our thinking today with an inner preconditioning categorical imperative or moral intuition which imposes its ideals on objective facts, which in theory claims to be independent of objective facts, which pronounces sensations and impulses and a physical environment and social conditions external and indifferent. Modern science has given us a living organism in vital contact with a physical environment. This living biological process contains certain innate ways of responding toward certain objects in the environment. In the human, in contrast to the animal, world there is greater plasticity of response to the environment. There is not such a definite correlation between impulse and stimulus. Nevertheless the only linkage between the mind and the objective world is through the organism with which and through which the mind has been evolved. This correlation of organism and environment though plastic in the human sphere is the biological foundation of the psychological correlation of mind and environment.

Although the development of the human cerebrum has rendered plastic the correlation of impulses and their appropriate stimuli, nevertheless there is an innate correlation between impulse and the objective environment. There is not the stereotyped correlation which exists in the animal organism. But there is correlation. Habit and custom and intelligence and the environment may account for the different forms of family, of property, of social life. But that all men have some form of family, some property system, some type of social and political organization, is due to innate human needs. These needs, these impulses organically, psychologically, imply certain objective interests and fulfillments. This means that purely inner attitudes of will and purely introspective states of mind can only be the result of a process of introversion. They are aspects of experience which have become detached from their appropriate objective ends through conflict and consequent disassociation. Will, attitudes, purpose, conscience, can be understood only as conscious parts of a living segment which is part of, and which completes, the circle of life. The other segments are physical, chemical, physiological and biological. Will is the result of the development of judgment which makes possible motivation and conscious control. But moral control is a control of something, and this something controlled can only be a biological process. This process is not the same in the higher, as it is in the lower, forms of life. But it preserves certain needs, predispositions-sexual, proprietary, social, which give to the normal moral will certain necessary objectives. However, these needs do not

get expressed in stereotyped forms. A normal moral will is a process which completes, through intelligent interpretation and control and more plastic reorganization, the biological process which it inherits. And this biological inheritance predisposes the human will to some form of manipulation, some form of ownership, some kind of sexual life. The specific form of vocation, of property, of family, of social organization, will depend upon the experience and activity of the individual.

This means that the mind as conceived by mediævalism, and this same mind as individualized by Protestantism and modern individualism is a subjective aspect of a living whole which has been detached from the objective ends of normal living as the result of a conflict with an unyielding world. This inner subjective will and conscience is a fiction because the will presupposes and is built upon a biological process which is incarnated in the bodily organism. The normal mind is through the organism correlated with the physical world; through instinct and impulse it is given certain objective ends and interests. The mind of the ancients, before the introversion process which culminated in the mystery religions, was through muscle and nerve and desire and imagination and will inseparably and organically a part of family, industry, politics, education, and art. But the conflict between the old order and an inner conscience typified in (historical) Christianity, the successful one of several mystery religions, brought about a dualism between a newer world conceived as inner and the older order which through conflict came to be regarded as external and outer.

Protestantism and individualism with their warfare on institutions and authority have perpetuated this bifurcation of experience.

Modern ethics based on psychology and biology does not start with a will which has walled itself in from a world of objective fact. We are coming to see that will is a process of behavior. Our general view of the mind is behavioristic. Sensation is an aspect of a motor response. Memory, Watson defines as the ability to repeat a form of response with a certain amount of loss. Perception is a response to a physical object as a unity when the stimulus is any one of a thing's sensory qualities. Hence perception is a consolidation, a unification of motor responses. Dewey and Watson are insisting that all these mental processes are forms of habit. Instinct, they insist, even if it be the ultimate root of behavior, appears in human conduct as a socially conditioned process. And Dewey has gone on to define thought as a reorganization of habit to include impulses set free through conflicting stimuli. Conscience, of course, is just this process of thought applied to matters of conduct.

This means that morals no longer deals with an inner will detachable from impulse and object. The moral will is a process of behavior wherein we achieve certain forms of organized response. There is no inner form of will which does not normally issue in some kind of objective response. Ethics presupposes psychology and psychology presupposes biology. The evolution of the cerebrum has introduced plasticity into the functioning of impulse but it has certainly not made impulse and behavior in any way independent of those

objective expressions with which they are correlated in the biological process. There is no inner moral will independent of those impulses which link the world of animal life to offspring, which give the gregarious animal some necessary social form of behavior. Such biological impulses seem to be constitutive elements and threads in the structure of the human will. If so any failure or defect in the organization and objective embodiment of such impulses means a loss or defect in the moral life. Ancient morality knew no individual without family, property, vocation and political solidarity. Modern morality in making war on the traditional forms of conduct has walled in a protesting and defiant will. Such a will, disassociated from the objective, institutional aspects of conduct, regarded as a symbol of transition is a genuine reality. But no such will exists as an independent moral entity. Impulse implies objective expression. This is the basis of ancient morality. But the objective expression of impulse must vary with the individual. This is the heart of modern ethical thought. When these two ethical truths are synthesized both the old ethics of authoritative tradition and the ethics of traditional individualism will disappear as conflicting ideals. Individuality will appear as the way in which the process of living behavior is realized, is embodied, is incarnated, in objective social ends, in plastic institutional forms.

Our ethics must define the individual in such a way as to include the social aspects of experience. We think of the inner life as sacred, but if will and thought are unintelligible apart from social behavior then the sacredness of the inner aspects of experience must be