§15.In conclusion it is necessary to enforce an exceedingly important distinction in the conception of social or human valuation.The term means two things, the attribution of human or social value by an individual and by a society.In most of our illustrations we have taken the standpoint of the Statesman or the reformer, or of some other person, and regarded social values from his eyes.We have taken his ideal as a social ideal.
So it is in the sense of being his ideal of a society.But it is essential also to consider society as seeking to realise its own ideal.'The whole succession of men during many ages,' said Pascal, 'should be considered as one Man, ever living and constantly learning.' This is the true organic view of humanity, regarded either as a single whole or in its several races, nations or communities.The apophthegm is not primarily of political or of ethical significance, but a statement of natural history.It is corroborated in a striking manner by modern biological teaching, with its continuity of the germ-plasm, its embryonic recapitulation and its specific evolution.
But not until natural history is rescued from the excessive domination of a purely physical biology, and is read in the language of collective psycho-physics, do we grasp the full bearing of the organic conception in its application to a society.For this conception of mankind as working out the human career by the operation of its original supply of faculties and feelings, in which instinctive physical motives take an increasing admixture of conscious rational guidance, is the key to an understanding of the ascent of man.There is no clear evidence of the continuous ascent of man regarded as individual, at any rate within 'historic' times.There is evidence of the ascent of human society towards a larger and closer complexity of human relations and a clearer intellectual and moral consciousness.
This means that mankind, as a whole, and its several societies, is becoming more capable of a human valuation and of a collective conduct of affairs guided by this conscious process.In politics, regarded in its wider meaning, this truth has taken shape in the modern conception of the general will, which in popularly-governed States functions through public opinion and representative institutions.Following our examination of the limits of science or 'rationalism' in the processes of valuation and of conduct on the part of individuals, we shall expect to find some corresponding limits in collective man.In other words, the general will of a people cannot be regarded, either in its estimates or its determinations, as a merely or a mainly calculative process, working out the respective values of existing circumstances, or proposed changes, in terms of clearly-defined utility.
It does not even with fuller information, wider education and firmer self-control, tend towards this scientific politics.Collective self-government, like individual self-government, will always remain essentially an art, its direction and determinant motives being creative, qualitative, and rooted in the primal instincts of man.
§16.It is upon this conception of the collective instincts of society regarded as an organism that a rational faith in democracy is based.
The animal organism, itself a society of cells, is endowed with energy of body and mind, operating through an equipment of instinctive channels towards its own survival and development and the survival and development of its species.Where there is danger lest too much of this energy should be consumed upon individual ends, too little on specific ends, the social or self-sacrificing instincts are strengthened in the individual, and are reinforced by the herd or specific feelings of other individuals, as where plunderers of the common stock or shirkers in the common tasks are destroyed by the hive or herd.The instinct for the survival and development of the hive, herd or species, cannot be satisfactorily explained as belonging only to the psycho-physical equipment of the individual members.On this basis, viz., that of attributing a social nature only to the individual members of a society, the acts of devotion and self-sacrifice, and still more the acts of preparatory skill, the elaborate performance of deeds that are means to the survival and well-being of a future generation, become mere haphazard miracles.Take the familiar example of the Hunting Wasp.
