Such a structure as the British Constitution, such an episode as the French Revolution, cannot be otherwise regarded, in its organic unity, than as a product of energies of common will and purpose, wider, deeper and obscurer in their working than the particular intelligible motives and aims which appeared on the stage of parliamentary debates, military campaigns or mob violence.Every student of the 'spirit' of one of these great national dramas is driven to recognise some moulding or directing influence, some urge of events, by which they seem to unfold themselves in a larger and more complex pattern or consistency than is perceived by any of the agents.
There is sometimes a tendency to give a mystical interpretation to this truth.So Victor Hugo writes of the French Revolution:
'Être un membre de la Convention, c'était être une vague de l'Ocean.Et ceci était vrai des plus grands.La force d'impulsion venait d'en haut.Il y avait dans la Convention une volonté qui était celle de tous et a'était celle de personne.Cette volontéétait une idée, idée indomptable et démesurée qui soufflait dans l'ombre du haut du ciel.Nous appelons cela la Révolution.
Quand cette idée passait elle abattait l'un et soulevait l'autre;elle emportait celui-ci en écume et brisait celui-là aux écueils.Cette idée savait où elle allait, et poussait le gouffre devant elle.Imputer la révolution aux hommes, c'est imputer la marée aux flots.'11The explanation of our colonial empire as the result of a career of conquest and expansion conducted 'in a fit of absence of mind' is an exact statement of the truth.For though a few great empire-builders, such as Warren Hastings, Molesworth, Elgin, Grey and Rhodes, may have played their parts with some measure of conscious design, the individual channels of this current of adventurous and constructive energy embodied in the general process had as little an idea of the imperial edifice as any working bee of the great symmetrical structure of the hive.
§18.This sense of 'manifest destiny' is surely no illusion.It is the evolutionary method by which all organic process is achieved, whether in the growth of an oak tree from its acorn, of a motor car from the earliest hand-barrow, a musical symphony from a savage tom-tom, or a modern federal state from the primitive tribal order.In every case a number of what seem separately motived actions are seen to carry and express the continuity of some common tendency which brings them under the control of a single collective design.This wider purpose is seen operating upon the larger organic stage of conduct in ways closely analogous to the operations of the poet or the artist in any human fine art.It exhibits the urge of an inner flow of psycho-physical energy seeking ever finer modes of expression by moulding the materials at its disposal.As soon as we grasp this idea of the collective artistry of a species or any other organic group, we recognise how lacking in logical finality is the accepted antithesis of instinct and reason.The reason of the organism will appear as a blind instinctive drive to the cell whose conduct it directs.So the specific purpose will show itself as instinct in the individual organism, though it may be neither blind nor unconscious to the species taken as the organic unit.Nay, we may go further and suggest that advancing reason in the individual animal may consist in a growing sympathy and syn-noesis with the operations of the wider organism.Must not this be what happens when what we term reason endorses and reinforces the instinctive actions of specific preservation and well-being, substituting reflection for impulse, plans for customs, orderly and changing institutions for blind ordinances whose authority is gregarious imitation or Superstitious prestige? Are we wrong when we trace an instinct of obedience to a chief transformed into a reasoned submission to the law? May not then the whole process of the rationalisation of man be regarded as a bringing of the individual man into vital communion of thought and feeling with the thoughts and feelings of the race, of humanity, perhaps of the larger organic being of the kosmos? For a man only becomes rational so far as he takes a disinterested view of himself, his fellow-men and of the world he lives in, and the wider, closer, keener that view the more rational he becomes.Thus the evolution of the mind of man into a fuller rationality means the strengthening and clarifying of those relations of feeling and thought which bind him to his fellows and to his world and which are rooted in the 'blind' instincts of gregarious, superstitious, curious man.
§19.The upshot of these considerations is to break down the abruptness of the contrast between reason and instinct and to recognise in reason itself the subtlest play of the creative instinct.The 'disinterested'
nature of the search for truth has been a subject of derision among some thinkers, who see no way by which man the individual can disengage himself from the selfish motives which seem to rule him and to dispose alike of his emotional and intellectual energies.In man regarded as individual it is very difficult to recognise any possibility of a disinterested motive, because all such motives are ruled out ex hypothesi.But regard the individual man as subject to the dominant control of some wider life than his, that of race, society, humanity or kosmos, and the difficulty disappears.He becomes capable of 'disinterested' curiosity, 'disinterested 'love,' self-sacrifices'
