that we only find ourselves as we find one another. The exchanges of love and friendship, the riches of fellowship—these are the most fruitful experiences of life. “We are members of one another”; and are fulfilled in each other. Our mutual need has released in us the Instinct of Sociability.
The weakness of this kind of analysis is that it appears to untwine threads that cannot be untwined in practice and never are separated in experience. Human instincts do not operate independently; they blend into each other continuously and inextricably in countless ways. We have seen how the reproductive impulse fused with the instinct of workmanship into an impulse toward creative art. But the debt has been repaid in the introduction of requirements of beauty into the exercise of workmanship. In the era of craftsmanship, the two impulses were very intimately blended, workmanship and creativeness going hand in hand in the erection of stately minsters, or in the making of harness for the squire’s horses. It is due to the development of the machine that these two impulses have been so widely parted in our time, to the immense injury of both; and it is one of the tasks, perhaps the chief of the tasks, facing us in the future to restore them to something of their old-time intimacy. Of this restoration, the great modern prophet is William Morris, who saw hope neither for the worker nor for the artist except in a closer association of industry with beauty, and who laid the foundation of this revived association by his own pioneer work as a house-decorator. This does not require, as some suppose, the scrapping of the machine industry, even though that were possible; it only requires that we understand the true place of the machine industry and put it there. Similarly, the instinct of sociability coalesced with those of workmanship and creativeness. The signal instance of this combination is to be found in the spirit of the mediæval Guilds; but there are other instances in plenty. Most of the great human achievements in thought, religion and art, have had a social origin, in schools of philosophers and prophets, in groups of artists and the like, and conversely new departures in thought, religion and art have become the foci of new groups.
Of all this the moral would seem to be that we must treat the energy of personality, its characteristic outgoing, as a single undivided indivisible stream; yet we must recognise it also as a stream containing a certain range of ingredients. Therefore, what we shall require of our ideal society is that it shall generate an atmosphere and an environment in which the constituent ingredients of personal energy shall find opportunity of full, co-ordinated and parallel development. It will be a society in which the instinct of workmanship, creativeness and sociability will grow side by side and hand in hand toward “the perfect man, of the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.”
Of this society then, we may say, that its marks will be that first every man shall have the opportunity of a secure and sufficient physical subsistence, second, that its work will press upward to the plane of art, and that its sociability will grow into vital and purposeful fellowship. By these tests we shall judge the soundness of democratic progress.
Our analysis has hitherto taken account only of the common man without reference to natural divergencies of genius or capacity. Professor Geddes has lately been emphasising Comte’s doctrine of history as an interplay of the temporal and spiritual powers, and his classification of the four Social types—Chiefs, People, Emotionals and Intellectuals. Mr. Arnold Bennett found men on the Clyde sorting themselves out into Organisers, Workers, Energisers and Initiators, which classification, as Professor Geddes justly points out, corresponds closely to Comte’s. These types, however, reduce themselves to two, namely those chiefly animated by the impulse of action, and those chiefly animated by the impulse of reflection. Of course, these types shade off imperceptibly into one another, because the impulses which give them their peculiar colour are native to and present in universal human nature. And while it is certain that nature will see to it that mankind will be delivered from the doom of a dead uniformity, it is nevertheless necessary that we should aim at the full development of both the active and reflective impulses in every man. Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets! Hitherto, we have considered man as actuated mainly by the impulse of action; but the release and development of the impulse of reflection is essential to the growth of society. For the experience which is the sequel of action is condemned to sterility except it be reflected upon. Reflection upon experience is the appointed guide of further action. We must, therefore, add to our tests of sound democratic progress, a fourth, namely, that it shall be of a kind to stimulate and encourage reflection. It must, that is, include a method of education whereby every man shall as far as possible become capable of independent thought and sound judgment.
Out of all this emerges immediately one certain conclusion. The kind of society which encourages creative self-expression, independent judgment and a living expanding fellowship must necessarily be conceived and created in freedom. For to these essential human impulses, freedom is the very breath of life. The initial problem of sociology is, therefore, the achievement of freedom; upon that foundation, and that only, can it build for eternity.
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