Economic development -- Social aspects; Social evolution; Social problems; Work
“We” are human, “I” am an animal, save as “I,” being part of Society,
embody and represent it. The discord and mischief which would be wrought
in a physical organism by any absurd pretence of individual life and
interest on the part of its organs, is precisely the discord and misery
wrought in our social organism by the persistence of this archaic idea.
Another error, most deeply basic in its logical relation, though perhaps
not so early recognised by the conscious mind, is our general belief
that pleasure lies wholly—or even mainly—in impression. Like the first,
it dates from a pre-social status, is the governing theory of personal
animal life, and has not been removed and replaced by truer views as
social life is developed.
The individual animal having no functions but those of maintenance,
reproduction, and improvement, and accomplishing his improvement only
along lines of personal heredity, acted only toward those ends, and
remained at rest when those ends were served. Pleasure led and pain
drove him to the attainment of the means to these ends of this
fulfilment, so he early learned to associate pleasure with getting what
he wanted,—pain with the lack of it,—a perfectly true concept as far as
it went. But as the individual animal’s activities are promptly
reactionary, and not matters of conscious judgment and volition, he
never took into account the pleasure inherent in action, in the
discharge of energy, and the pain equally inherent in the prevention of
such discharge.
The nerves bring to us sense of pain and pleasure: certain currents feel
good to them, certain others bad. An inflow of warmth is a pleasure;
increase the vibration, make it heat, it becomes pain, agony, torture.
The sensory nerves bring to us their burden of impression, the
consciousness we call enjoyment or dislike; but have the motory nerves
no burden? Are the currents of energy going out not as perceptible as
those coming in? To the individual animal they are not; he does not
“feel himself work” particularly. His consciousness is in his income,
not in his output.
But the social creature comes under different conditions. His range of
activity increases, both in complexity and power; he has an enlarging
fund of energy to discharge and a thousand complicated avenues to
discharge it through. Moreover, this discharge is no longer a personal
affair of his own arms and legs, but involves concurrent action of many
others.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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