>From the group process arise social understanding and true sympathy. At the same moment appears the social will which is the creative will. Many writers are laying stress on the_possibilities_ of the collective will; what I wish to emphasize is the necessity of _creating_ the collective will. Many people talk as if the collective will were lying round loose to be caught up whenever we like, but the fact is we must go to our group and see that it is brought into existence.

Moreover, we go to our group to learn the process. We sometimes hear the advantages of collective planning spoken of as if an act of Congress or Parliament could substitute collective for individual planning! But it is only by doing the deed that we shall learn this doctrine. We learn how to create the common will
in our groups, and we learn here not only the process but its value. When I can see that agreement with my neighbor for larger ends than either of us is pursuing alone is of the same essence as capital and labor learning to think together, as Germany and the Allies evolving a common will, then I am ready to become a part of the world process. To learn how to evolve the social will day by day with my neighbors and fellow-workers is what the world is demanding of me to-day. This is getting into the inner workshop of
democracy.

Until we learn this lesson war cannot stop, no constructive work can be done. The very essence and substance of democracy is the creating of the collective will. Without this activity the forms of democracy are useless, and the aims of democracy are always unfulfilled. Without this activity both political and industrial democracy must be a chaotic, stagnating, self-stultifying assemblage. Many of the solutions offered to-day for our social problems are vitiated by their mechanical nature, by assuming that if society were given a new form, the socialistic for instance, what we desire would follow. But this assumption is not true. The deeper truth, perhaps the deepest, is that _the will to will the common will_ is the core, the germinating centre of that larger, still larger, ever larger life which we are coming to call the true
democracy.

Chapter VI
The Unity of the Social Process

We have seen that the common idea and the common will are born together in the social process. One does not lead to the other, each is involved in the other. But the collective thought and the collective will are not yet complete, they are hardly an embryo.
They carry indeed within themselves their own momentum, but they complete themselves only through activity in the world of affairs, of work, of government. This conception does away with the whole
discussion, into which much ardor has gone, of the priority of thought or action in the social life. There is no order. The union of thought and will and activity by which the clearer will is generated, the social process, is a perfect unity.

We see this in our daily life where we do not finish our thought, construct our will, and then begin our actualizing. Not only the actualizing goes on at the same time, but its reactions help us to shape our thought, to energize our will. We have to digest our social experience, but we have to have social experience before we can digest it. We must learn and build and learn again through the building, or we must build and learn and build again through the learning.

We sit around the council table not blank pages but made up of all our past experiences. Then we evolve a so-called common will, then we take it into the concrete world to see if it will work. In so far as it does work, it proves itself; in so far as it does not, it generates the necessary idea to make it "common." Then again we test and so on and so on. In our work always new and necessary modifications arise which again in actualizing _themselves_, again modify themselves. This is the process of the generation of the common will. First, it appears as an ideal, secondly it works itself out in the material sphere of life, thereby generating
itself in a new form and so on forever and ever. All is a-making.
This is the process of creating the absolute or Good Will. To elevate General Welfare into our divinity makes a golden calf of it, erects it as something external to ourselves with an absolute nature of its own, whereas it is the ever new adjusting of ever new relatings to one another. The common will never finds perfection but is always seeking it. Progress is an infinite advance towards the infinitely receding goal of infinite perfection.

How important this principle is will appear later when we apply these ideas to politics. Democratic ideals will never advance unless we are given the opportunity of constantly embodying them in action, which action will react on our ideals. Thought and will go out into the concrete world in order to generate their own complete form. This gives us both the principle and the method of democracy. A democratic community is one in which the common will is being gradually created by the civic activity of its citizens.
The test of democracy is the fulness with which this is being done.
The practical thought for our political life is that the collective will exists only through its self-actualizing and self-creating in new and larger and more perfectly adjusted forms.

Thus the unity of the social process becomes clear to us. We now gain a conception of "right," of purpose, of loyalty to that purpose, not as particularist ideas but as arising within the process.

RIGHT

We are evolving now a system of ethics which has three conceptions in regard to right, conscience and duty which are different from much of our former ethical teaching: (1) we do not follow right, we create right, (2) there is no private conscience, (3) my duty is never to "others" but to the whole.

First, we do not follow right merely, we create right. It is often thought vaguely that our ideals are all there, shining and splendid, and we have only to apply them. But the truth is that we have to create our ideals. No ideal is worth while which does not grow from our actual life. Some people seem to keep their idealsall carefully packed away from dust and air, but arranged alphabetically so that we can get at them quickly in need. But we can never take out a past ideal for a present need. The ideal which is to be used for our life must come out from that very life.
The only way our past ideals can help us is in moulding the life which produces the present ideal; we have no further use for them.
But we do not discard them; we have built them into the present -- we have used them up as the cocoon is used up in making the silk.
It has been sometimes taught that given the same situation, the individual must repeat the same behavior. But the situation is never the same, the individual is never the same; such a conception has nothing to do with life. We cannot do our duty in the old sense, that is of following a crystallized ideal, because our duty
is new at every moment.

Moreover, the knowledge of what is due the whole is revealed within the life of the whole. This is above everything else what a progressive ethics must teach -- not faithfulness to duty merely, but faithfulness to the life which evolves duty. Indeed "following our duty" often means mental and moral atrophy. Man cannot live by tabus; that means stagnation. But as one tabu after another is disappearing, the call is upon us deliberately to build our own moral life. Our ethical sense will surely starve on predigested food. It is we by our acts who progressively construct the moral universe; to follow some preconceived body of law -- that is not for responsible moral beings. In so far as we obey old standards without interpenetrating them with the actual world, we are abdicating our creative power.

Further, the group in its distributive aspect is bringing such new elements into the here and now that life is wholly changed, and the ethical commands therein involved are different, and therefore the task of the group is to discover the new formulation which these new elements demand. The moral law thus gathers to itself all the richness of science, of art, of all the fullness of our daily living.

The group consciousness of right thus developed becomes our daily imperative. No mandate from without has power over us. There are many forms of the fallacy that the governing and the governed can be two different bodies, and this one of conforming to standards which we have not created must be recognized as such before we can have any sound foundation for society. When the ought is not a mandate from without, it is no longer a prohibition but a self-expression. As the social consciousness develops, ought will be
swallowed up in will. We are some time truly to see our life as positive, not negative, as made up of continuous willing, not of restraints and prohibition. Morality is not the refraining from doing certain things -- it is a constructive force.

So in the education of our young people it is not enough to teach them their "duty," somehow there must be created for them to live in a world of high purpose to which their own psychic energies will instinctively respond. The craving for self-expression, self-realization, must see quite naturally for its field of operation
the community. This is the secret of education: when the waters of our life are part of the sea of human endeavor, duty will be a difficult word for our young people to understand; it is a glorious
consciousness we want, not a painstaking conscience. It is ourselves soaked with the highest, not a Puritanical straining to fulfil an external obligation, which will redeem the world.

Education, therefore is not chiefly to teach children a mass of things which have been true up to the present moment; moreover it is not to teach them to learn about life as fast as it is made, not even to interpret life, but above and beyond everything, to create life for themselves. Hence education should be largely the
training in making choices. The aim of all proper training is not rigid adherence to a crystallized right (since in ethics, economics or politics there is no crystallized right), but the power to make a new choice at every moment. And the greatest lesson of all is to know that every moment _is_ new. "Man lives in the dawn forever.
Life is beginning and nothing else but beginning. It begins ever-lastingly."

We must breed through the group process the kind of man who is not fossilized by habit, but whose eye is intent on the present situation, the present moment, present values, and can decide on the forms which will best express them in the actual world.

To sum up this point: morality is never static; it advances as life advances. You cannot hang your ideas up on pegs and take down no. 2 for certain emergencies and no. 4 for others. _The true test of our morality is not the rigidity with which we adhere to standards, but the loyalty we show to the life which constructs
standards_. The test of our morality is whether we are living not to follow but to create ideals, whether we are pouring our life into our visions only to receive it back with its miraculous enhancements for new uses.

Secondly, I have said that the conception of right as a group product, as coming from the ceaseless interplay of men, shows us that there is no such thing as an individual conscience in the sense in which the term is often used. As we are to obey no ideals dictated by others or the past, it is equally important that we obey no ideal set up by our unrelated self. To obey moral law is to obey social ideal. The social ideal is born, grows and shapes itself through the associated life. The individual cannot alone decide what is right or wrong. We can have no true moral judgment except as we live our life with others. It is said, "Every man is
subject only to his own conscience." But what is my conscience?
Has it not been produced by my time, my country, my associates? To make a conscience by myself would be as difficult as to try to make a language by myself [1].

1. This does not, however, put us with those biologists who make conscience a "gregarious instinct" and -- would seem to be willing to keep it there. This is the insidious herd fallacy which crops up constantly in every kind of place. We may to-day partake largely of the nature of the herd, our conscience may be to some extent a herd conscience, but such is not the end of man for it is not the true nature of man --
man does not find his expression in the herd.

It is sometimes said, on the other hand, "The individual must yield his right to judge for himself; let the majority judge." But the individual is not for a moment to yield his right to judge for himself; he can judge better for himself if he joins with others in evolving a synthesized judgment. Our individual conscience is not
absorbed into a national conscience; our individual conscience must be incorporated in a national conscience as one of its constituent members [1].

1. To a misunderstanding of this point are due some of the fallacies of the political pluralists (see ch. XXXII).

Those of us who are not wholly in sympathy with the conscientious objectors do not think that they should yield to the majority.
When we say that their point of view is too particularistic, we do not mean that they should give up the dictates of their own conscience to a collective conscience. But we mean that they should ask themselves whether their conscience is a freak, a purely personal conscience, or a properly evolved conscience. That is, have they tried, not to saturate themselves with our collective ideals, but to take their part in evolving collective standards by freely giving and taking. Have they lived the life which makes possible the fullest interplay of their own ideas with all the forces of their time? Before they range themselves against society
they must ask themselves if they have taken the opportunities offered them to help form the ideas which they are opposing. I do not say that there is no social value in heresy, I only ask the conscientious objectors to ask themselves whether they are claiming the "individual rights" we have long outgrown.

What we want is a related conscience, a conscience that is intimately related to the conscience of other men and to all the spiritual environment of our time, to all the progressive forces of our age. The particularistic tendency has had its day in law, in politics, in international relations and as a guiding tendency in our daily lives.

We have seen that a clearer conception to-day of the unity of the social process shows us: first, that we are not merely to follow but to create "right," secondly, that there is no private conscience, and third, that my duty is never to "others" but to the whole. We no longer make a distinction between selfishness and
altruism [1].

1. See p. 45 (ch 4, para 4th)

An act done for our own benefit may be social and one done for another may not be. Some twenty or thirty years ago our "individual" system of ethics began to be widely condemned and we have been hearing a great deal of "social" ethics. But this so- called "social" ethics has meant only my duty to "others." There
is now emerging an idea of ethics entirely different from the altruistic school, based not on the duty of isolated beings to one another, but on integrated individuals acting as a whole, evolving whole-ideas, working for whole-ideals. The new consciousness is of a whole.

PURPOSE

As right appears with that interrelating, germinating activity which we call the social process, so purpose also is generated by the same process. The goal of evolution most obviously must evolve itself. How self-contradictory is the idea that evolution is the world-process and yet that some other power has made the goal for it to reach. The truth is that the same process which creates all else creates the very purpose. That purpose is involved in the process, not prior to process, has far wider reaching consequences than can be taken up here. The whole philosophy of cause and effect must be rewritten. If the infinite task is the evolution of the whole, if our finite tasks are wholes of varying degrees of scope and perfection, the notion of causality must have an entirely different place in our system of thought.

The question is often asked, "What is the proposed unity of European nations after the war to be for?" This question implies that the alliance will be a mere method of accomplishing certain purposes, whereas it is the union which is the important thing.
With the union the purpose comes into being, and with its every step forward, the purpose changes. No one would say that the aims of the Allies to-day are the same as in 1914 or even as in April 1917. As the alliance develops, the purpose steadily shapes itself.

Every teleological view will be given up when we see that purpose is not "preexistent," but involved in the unifying act which is the life process. It is man's part to create purpose and to actualize it. From the point of view of man we are just in the dawn of self-consciousness, and his purpose is dimly revealing itself to him.
The life-force wells up in us for expression -- to direct it is the privilege of self-consciousness [1].

1. This view of purpose is not necessarily antagonistic to the "interest" school of sociology, but we may perhaps look forward to a new and deeper analysis of self-interest. And the view here put forward is not incompatible with the "objective" theory of association (see ch. XXIX) nor with the teleological school of jurisprudence (see ch. XV), it merely emphasizes another point of view -- a point of view which tends to synthesize the "subjective" and "objective" theories of law. But those jurists who say that a group is governed by its purpose and leave the matter there are making a thing-in- itself of the purpose; we are governed by the purpose, yes, but we are all the time evolving the purpose. Modern jurists wish a dynamic theory of law -- only such a conception of purpose as is revealed by group psychology will give value to
a teleological school of jurisprudence.

LOYALTY

As this true purpose evolves itself, loyalty springs into being.
Loyalty is awakened through and by the very process which creates the group. The same process which organizes the group energizes it. We cannot "will" to be loyal. Our task is not to "find" causes to awaken our loyalty, but to live our life fully and loyalty issues. A cause has no part in us or we in it if we have
fortuitously to "find" it.

Thus we see that we do not love the Beloved Community because it is lovable -- the same process which makes it lovable produces our love for it. Moreover it is not enough to love the Beloved Community, we must find out how to create it. It is not there for us to accept or reject -- it exists only through us. Loyalty to a collective will which we have not created and of which we are, therefore, not an integral part, is slavery. We belong to our community just in so far as we are helping to make that community; then loyalty follows, then love follows. Loyalty means the consciousness of oneness, the full realization that we succeed or fail, live or die, are saved or damned together. The only unity or community is one we have made of ourselves, by ourselves, for ourselves [1].

1. In a relation of two I am not faithful to the other person but to my conception of the relation in the whole.
Loyalty is always to the group idea not to the group- personnel. This must change our idea of patriotism.

Thus the social process is one all-inclusive, Self-sufficing process. The vital impulse which is produced by all the reciprocally interacting influences of the group is also itself the generating and the vivifying power. Social unity is not a sterile conception but an active force. It is a double process -- the activity which goes to make the unity and the activity which flows from the unity. There is no better example of centripetal and
centrifugal force. All the forces which are stored up in the unity flow forth eternally in activity. We create the common will and feel the spiritual energy which flows into us from the purpose we have made, for the purpose which we seek.