PART II

PSYCHOLOGICAL

CHAPTER VI

THE ORGANIZATION OF THE MORAL SENTIMENTS

§ 1. THE LIMITATIONS OF SOCIAL SCIENCE

NOWHERE are we so painfully aware of the limitations of exact scientific method as in the study of social phenomena. To insist upon anything approximating the exactness of natural science is to make of truth in things social at best a piecemeal affair, a collection of membra disjecta. To fall back upon the analogies of the poet or the insights of the philosopher is to lose touch with the pluralistic level of factual detail. Wholeness and reality are for the student of social problems largely overlapping terms. Every sociologist or social philosopher must be something of a realist in the scholastic sense. The ens universalissimum is the correlative of the ens realissimum. But to anaylze and explain is to disintegrate. Hence in the search for social verities we are constantly in danger of dissipating them, of making them intangible. To lose the whole point of view is to sacrifice part of the reality, for we are dealing with a situation in which the bearing of the whole upon a given part lends to the part both its meaning and its reality.

The social scientist, therefore, is particularly apt to be a worshipper of generalizations. The fascinating and infinitely complex problems he faces encourage a state of mind in which he fails to distinguish the scientific principle legitimately drawn from the facts from the generalization of the philosopher based upon insight. He often moves in a realm of half-lights

that is neither science nor philosophy. Here is the basis for the accusation often leveled at sociology that it is a pseudoscience or a half-hearted philosophy or both. Old philosophical terms are, to be sure, taboo. But it is by no means unusual to find a sociologist, after having properly damned the good old-fashioned metaphysician, proceeding to give us brilliant philosophical speculations of his own. The newness of the subject, its intense human interest, and the apparent concreteness of the terms used serve to conceal the essentially speculative character of his thought. By elevating his generalizations to the dignity of proven laws of society he is really guilty of the old, old fallacy of reifying abstractions.

Much has been done by the social psychologist to place the study of society upon a scientific basis. Certainly much of the futility of the speculations of social philosophers both past and present is to be traced to their ignorance of the fundamental psychological facts involved in the social situation. It seems best, therefore, to preface the more detailed discussion of the social conscience with a psychological analysis of the moral sentiments. We must keep in mind, however, the variety of the facts and forces concerned, their subtlety and difficulty of control, their close affiliations with the instinctive and habitual phases of experience, and especially their social character. We shall find that our task is not an easy one. The classical systems of traditional metaphysics, with their academic dignity, their remoteness from life and their logical finality are comparatively simple compared with the bewildering complexity, the tragic human interest and the sense of unplumbed depths suggested by the eternal social problem.

§ 2. ORGANIZATION FUNDAMENTAL IN CHARACTER Thanks to the accumulated facts of psychology, sociology, and anthropology, we have been made aware of the exceedingly complicated structure of the moral experience and of its more or less adventitious character. We now know that the simplest moral sentiment presupposes a long process of organization and evolution in the group and in the individual. Or

ganization and development rather than intuition or revelation provide us with the key to the moral problem. Impulse, instinct, emotion, sentiment, ideal are not separate entities. They are functions of character, forms, and phases of the activity of a feeling, reasoning, and willing creature. They emerge, therefore, only as organically related to a living whole. Any mechanical or purely analytical explanation of the moral sentiments and their constituent elements can only furnish us with a set of empty and useless abstractions. We cannot reduce character to a set of ultimate and persistent elements like the stones in a mosaic or the bricks in a building.

Character is in fact a complexio oppositorum. Every system of sentiments tends to develop penchants that further that system and these penchants often persist after the systems of sentiments which created them have disappeared. Hence the mature character presents at best a strange melange of tendencies, habits, bedraggled and half-forgotten ideals. Courage and cowardice, nobility and meanness, sincerity and deceit, open-mindedness and constraint, dwell under the same roof-tree, often in a strange and apparently unholy concord. So successful is life in imprinting upon the human heart its own inherent contrarieties, its persistent paradoxes. The classical moralists, the theologian as well as the social scientist, have been more or less unaware of the inherent complexities of human nature because their attention has been directed to the logical and institutional formulation of the moral life rather than to the process by which this formulation has been attained. They have ignored, therefore, the slow and painful evolution whereby, partly through reason and partly through wasteful trial and error, men have succeeded in organizing their moral experiences. In our study of the moral sentiments it seems fitting, therefore, that we should begin with the principle of organization.

Organization is perhaps the most inveterate and outstanding characteristic of all living things. To be sure, we may predicate organization in a sense of inanimate nature but it is mechanical, disinterested, inert. The organizations and dis

integrations that are constantly taking place in the entire sweep of the mechanical cosmos, from a dewdrop to a solar system, are apparently indifferent to the question of possible loss or gain of moral values. Only in the imagination of the poet or the mystic do the winds of the night or the stars in their courses groan and travail together with man in his moral and spiritual struggles. The unmorality of nature is apparently vast, unequivocal, inarticulate, absolute. Organization among living things, however, differs fundamentally from the mechanical organization of nature. For the living thing is interested in its own self-preservation, in the continuity of its existence, in the satisfaction of its interests. With the emergence of life value comes to have meaning and reality in the world. The indifference of inanimate nature disappears. Existence becomes vastly more interesting, more dramatic, because of the presence of things that can suffer and enjoy.

Organization is presupposed at the very beginning of mental evolution. "Indeed we seem to have no evidence of anything growing into a system in the course of mental development which was not a system at the outset ". One of the marks of the pre-rational elements of character is that they to a certain extent already form a system and seek a definite goal; otherwise they would not be able to find a place in a more comprehensive organization. A typical illustration of this at the beginnings of the mental development is found in the rise of voluntary control. The babe is equipped at birth with a number of motor coördinations which are for the most part random and spontaneous and poorly executed. But this imperfect hereditary equipment forms the nucleus for further organization extending to the larger muscles first and finally to the more delicate adjustments of the smaller muscles.

Thus, at first unconsciously and later consciously, the mental life manifests the fundamental tendency to grow through organization. The process continues as long as conscious life lasts. It exhibits the very spirit and intent of all conscious activity. The amused child is content because its

toys, games, or what not, provide material for the insatiable demand of the mind for organization. Enforced idleness or aimless activity is torture to the alert individual because of the dearth of material for the organizing activity of the mind. For the same reason the impulsives and the hystericals who represent the lowest types of character are more frequently the victims of ennui because of the incapacity for sustained mental activity due to the lack of organization.

The highest and most intelligent form of organization, and hence the completest expression of life, is found in human character. The principle of organization, therefore, provides us with a criterion not only for placing character in the scale of being but also for the evaluation of character itself. For the most highly organized characters are the most perfect and possess the greatest social value. It is possible to classify characters according to the degree and type of their organization. Thus in the balanced character we have an organization of instincts, emotions, and sentiments without any pronounced preponderance of any one element. There is rather a harmony of strong and well developed tendencies which balance each other and form a unified ensemble in which no one sentiment or emotion dominates to the extent that it destroys the general harmony. In the unified character, on the other hand, there is not so much a harmony which results from the balance of equal tendencies as the subordination of all the tendencies under one master passion. In other types of character, such as the reflective, the nervous, the constrained, the emotional, the tranquil, and the like, we have still other phases of organization; the list is all but inexhaustible. In the impulsive character, the lowest type of all, the principle of organization seems to be violated entirely. But even here organization still obtains. For the partial disintegration of personality in the neurotic is really due to the fact that the higher systems of sentiment are supplanted by lower systems of emotion, which are partially isolated and function as independent selves.

The organization of the moral sentiments presupposes,