Economic development -- Social aspects; Social evolution; Social problems; Work
_Our “common sensorium” the “human heart.” All human feelings common.
Action and reaction between body and spirit. Cat and Sheep. Mob spirit,
civic spirit, etc. Effect of institutions. Effect of industries.
Confusion from Ego Concept. Prominence of painful processes. Widening
social consciousness. Collective pleasure greatest. Team-work. Effect of
position of women. Sex combat in industry. Altruism and Omniism. “Self”
an extensible term. Organic relation. Progressive injury of egoism.
Effect of special industries on altruism. Sailor, farmer, miner.
Household labour. Men more altruistic than women. Religion has not
understood altruism, which is a natural social instinct. Man with tail.
Nature of “charity,” transfusion of blood. Selfishness and socialness.
My soul, our soul. Social needs. Inefficiency of personal gratification.
Longitudinal extension of the soul’s life not satisfactory. Must widen
our life, our soul. The Social Passion. Names do not affect facts.
Social life evolves social love. Social instinct in duty, in work.
Social ascetics. Human nature Social nature._
VII
THE SOCIAL SOUL
Some deny the organic concept of society on the ground that we human
beings have no “common sensorium.” But we have. The most conspicuous and
distinctive fact in our psychology is precisely that common sensorium.
We call it in ordinary speech “the human heart,” or “the human spirit,”
or “soul,” and quite correctly. It is human, and “human” is “social”; it
is the social soul.
The individual feels it, inasmuch as the brain, our medium of sensation,
is lodged in an individual head; but what he feels is a common feeling,
not a personal one. He has of course his purely individual range of
sensations, emotions, promptings to action; but these are felt also by
any other animal, they are not “human.”
All our distinctive human feelings are in common, are transmissible,
belong to us collectively, not individually. So markedly true is this
that we have labelled our most visibly collective feelings “humane.”
Common feeling is human feeling, and that great sum of higher
consciousness we call the soul is the human soul.
Psychological terms are all vague and slippery to handle; but we can
clearly observe in any living thing these two departments—the spirit and
the body. While they are together the thing lives, works, goes; when
divided the body gradually disintegrates.
We observe, too, that once a specific allotment of spirit makes to
itself such and such a form, that the form continually reacts upon the
spirit and modifies it. Each animal as we know it has a spirit exactly
suited to his body, evidently the result of long lodgment in it. The
sheep has a spirit suited to his body, the cat has a spirit suited to
his body. Each can do what he wants to and wants to do what he can.
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