the specialized minds engaged in rearing law, morality, religion, literature, and science. The organizing of thought in respect to fundamentals is left to a small number of men. More and more we retire to the side lines and watch the star players advance the ball. The bulk of us are consumers of the mental products of the masters, mere passengers who do nothing to get the ship forward, but (sometimes!) pay the wages of those who work her. Our growing passiveness in respect to constructive thought does not cause us to become equally passive as regards decision. Jealously we cling to our place in will-organization even if we drop out of thought-organization. The specialist shall not steal away the layman's freedom. Although most of us no longer discuss the foundations of right and wrong for fear of getting beyond our depth, we choose freely between the traditional ethics and the new moralities. For all that the framing of religion now goes on far above his head, the ordinary man is not mentally enslaved so long as he may please himself as to the type of religion he adopts. The committing of the technical tasks of government to trained men does not, as some allege, substitute "government by experts" for "the people's government." The determining of functions and policies still rests with the citizens or their representatives. State highway engineer, food chemist, forester, or pathologist is there only as a servant to carry out effectively their purpose. UNCONSCIOUS ORGANIZATION OF THOUGHT Worn path and made road are collective products, but the makers of the former knew not what they did. Until writing or printing made it possible to fix and identify the product of the individual artist or thinker, the organizing of thought into stable forms must have gone on mainly in an unconscious way. That greatest storehouse of thought, language, came into being by a process which scholars describe as growth, rather than production. Tarde gives all the credit of language to word inventors, forgetting that every word or phrase they coined had to run the gauntlet of the tribe. Only those which struck their fellows as pat or fit survived, and these were trimmed or twisted to suit better the tongues or minds of the users. So was it with the making of popular proverbs, saws, and riddles. Some, no doubt, were struck off perfect in an inspired mo CHAP. Proverbs and Riddles, Myths, Fairy Even Folk-songs Are Springing from the Mind ment; but others reached their terse and telling form only after many wits had helped to file and point and barb them. No end of sayings failed to "make a hit " and were forgotten; so that the ones treasured and handed down were just those which "rang a bell" in the average mind. Nor are early myth, fairy tale, legend, folk-song, or ballad to be looked upon as the handiwork of the individual artist, like the modern poem or drama. Scholars now assure us that they were communal " in origin, meaning, not that the "people" was their author, but that so many had a hand in fashioning them and that, being transmitted only by oral tradition, they were so easily molded to the general taste, that each embodies and expresses not an individual mind, but the soul of the tribe or the folk. The author of the ballad, insists Professor Gummere, is "the singing, dancing, improvising crowd." Among primitives, as among oldstyle European peasants, nearly every one can improvise. Says Grosse, "Every native in Australia himself provides the songs of his house." Among the Eskimos "nearly everybody has his own songs." In the festal dance songs are built up bit by bit, one after another contributing a short improvisation in the intervals of a chorus. Winnowed, handed down in tradition, and gradually perfected, these become ballad and folk-song. One reason the verses of Negro folk-songs are so broken and fragmentary is that they originated in the communal excitement of the religious assembly. "A happy phrase, a striking bit of imagery, flung out by some individual was taken up and repeated Communal by the whole congregation. Naturally the most expressive phrases, the lines that most adequately voiced the deep, unconscious desires of the whole people, were remembered longest and repeated most frequently. There was, therefore, a process of natural section by which the best, the most representative verses, those which most adequately expressed the profounder and more permanent moods and sentiments of the Negro, were preserved and became part of the permanent tradition of the race." " The Epic Poem Is Rarely an Individual Product Thanks to literary research, we no longer look upon the folkepic, Iliad or Mahabarata, as the creation of a single genius, but as a unified collection of song-stuffs which have long been accumulating. The epic poet is the heir to great treasures. For ar 2 Park, "Publications of the American Sociological Society," Vol. XIII, p. 55. ranging and harmonizing the traditional materials, filling the gaps, Early morals and custom were a snug fit because the outcome of an unconscious process. Rules arose, not from reflection upon the requisites of social order, but from the clash of egoisms. The conflicting desires of interfering individuals ground against one another until, in conceding that one must not "remove the landmark" nor "make the ephah small" nor "withhold the pledge after the debtor had repaid the loan, they ceased to chafe. Thus folk molded law as hand molds glove. Then came the individual thinker prophet, lawgiver, religious teacher, schoolman, canonist, moral philosopher-correcting or completing folk custom and law. Finally, in working out national codes and framing great pieces of constructive legislation, our own time has discovered how to procure the collaboration of many picked minds. Once written down or printed, a man's work is tagged and stays as he left it. As such works accumulate, the communal fount dries up. Specialists and schools arise, so that the people at large have no part in advancing thought or art. The folk being out of it, why does not the individual take the bit in his teeth and bolt? Surely there will be confusion, a riot of temperament and caprice! No, the thought of an age shows much consistency and dovetails fairly well into the past. If agreement is wanting in its metaphysics or ethics or philosophy, it is because rival systems divide the field, each of them, however, a logical structure. Most of the literary masterpieces of a period show certain common characteristics, as if the writers had been taking account of one another. One reason is the dependence of the creative genius on other geniuses, living and dead. Few minds become pregnant with literature until they have been fructified by close acquaintance with CHAP. The Creative Genius Is Fructified by Ac quaintance with the Best Prod uct of His Predeces sors The Public No and Conditions of Fruitful Oral Discussion the best that has been said or sung. Herder has this in mind when he speaks of die Kette der Bildung. Taine exhorts the striving artist: "Fill your spirit and your heart, however great they may be, with the ideas and feelings of your century and the work of art will come." If explaining a writer he attaches great importance to the moment, i.e., the direction that art happened to be taking at the time. Another organizing influence is the public, which acts as a sieve, letting some products of genius pass while others drop to the scrap heap. Since thinkers cannot give ethics or law a slant that shall bring it into constant clash with the popular sense of right, since poets and artists cannot long run counter to the popular taste, the barren public is after all a sleeping partner in the culture of the time. To the fertile spirits it might well utter the warning: "They reckon ill who leave me out." The public, however, has little to do with the rising structure of science. Unlike jurisprudence or literature, which have to suit themselves to the people, science has to conform to reality. Its line of advance is determined by its own canons of truth, not by popular favor. A music the people will not listen to, a literature they will not read, a morality they will not approve, can hardly be said to exist for them; but a science they do not comprehend may be serving them in countless ways. CONSCIOUS ORGANIZATION OF THOUGHT Of the older forms of organization, Mr. Wallas, who has shed more light than any one else on the organizing of thought, says: The simplest and oldest is that which is constituted by a small number of persons - from two to perhaps seven or eight - who meet together for the purpose of sustained oral discussion. This form may be studied at its finest point of development in the dialogues of Plato. It is, as the Greeks knew, extraordinarily difficult. At first sight it might appear that the main condition of its success is that it should be as little "organized" as possible, that the group should meet by accident, and that each member of the group should freely obey his casual impulses both in speaking and in remaining silent. But a closer examination shows that the full efficiency of argument, carried on even by the most informal body of friends, requires, not only that each should be master of the most delicate shades of the same language, and that each should be accustomed to make use of similar rules of Thought, but that they should have a large body of knowledge in common, that each should be familiar with the peculiar strength and weakness of each of the others, and, above all, that each should be influenced by the same desire to follow truth "whithersoever the argument may lead." All this requires that the group should consist, not of men of average powers who have come accidentally together, but of men selected (as Socrates, for instance, selected his disciples) in some way which should secure that the worst of them should possess a rather unusual share of natural ability, acquired training, and interest in ideas. And normally, the necessary discipline and concentration cannot be secured unless some one of the party is accepted by the others as a leader, and does not abuse his position.3 The neglect of dialectic in our own time he attributes to the difficulty of modern philosophers coming together frequently, to their need of economizing time, to the role of the printing-press in circulating ideas, and to the fact that the modern scientist does much of his thinking while he is closely observing the concrete in the laboratory or the field. He insists, however, that we now rely too much on reading and solitary thinking, and that, in branches. whose subject-matter is human action and feeling, oral dialectic "has magnificent possibilities of fertility." One advantage is "a great extension of the range of immediate mental association." The solitary thinker, having tackled a problem, "waits till some promising idea comes into his mind and then dwells on it till further ideas spring from it." But if a group is engaged upon the problem, the waits are shorter, and each gets the benefit of such happy thoughts as occur to the other. Apart from this, many minds are keyed to their best only when at grips with other congenial minds. The conditions that rouse the subconscious self to utmost productivity vary greatly for different people. In olden time intellectuals sought the monastic cell; to-day they shut out distraction by means of a soundproof sky-lit studio at the top of the house. Some are most visited by ideas in darkness, or in artificial light. The born orator, on the other hand, is never so inspired as before "a sea of faces." Some get their best thoughts on an express train, while I know of an eminent mathematician who took his hardest problems to the opera, where the lights and the stir gave his intellect a rare edge. "The Great Society," pp. 242–43. |