Chapter VII
The Individual

As the collective idea and the collective will, right and purpose, are born within the all-sufficing social process, so here to the individual finds the wellspring of his life. The visible form in which this interplay of relations appears is society and the individual. A man is a point in the social process rather than a unit in that process, a point where forming forces meet straightway to disentangle themselves and stream forth again. In the language of the day man is at the same time a social factor and a social product.

People often talk of the social mind as if it were an abstract conception, as if only the individual were real, concrete. The two are equally real. Or rather the only reality is the relating of one to the other which creates both. Our sundering is as artificial and late an act as the sundering of consciousness into subject and object. The only reality is the interpenetrating of the two into experience. Late intellectualism abstracts for practical purposes the ego from the world, the individual from society.

But there is no way of separating individuals, they coalesce and coalesce, they are "confluent," to use the expression of James, who tells us that the chasm between men is an individualistic fiction, that we are surrounded by fringes, that these overlap and that by means of these I join with others. It is as in Norway when the colors of the sunset and the dawn are mingling, when to-day and to-morrow are at the point of breaking, or of uniting, and one does not know to which one belongs, to the yesterday which is fading or
the coming hour -- perhaps this is something like the relation of one to another: to the onlookers from another planet our colors might seem to mingle.

The truth about the individual and society has been already implied, but it may be justifiable to develop the idea further because of the paramount importance for all our future development of a clear understanding of the individual. Our nineteenth-century legal theory (individual rights, contract, "a man can do what he
likes with his own," etc.) was based on the conception of the separate individual [1].

1. See ch. XV, "From Contract to Community."

We can have no sound legal doctrine, and hence no social or political progress, until the fallacy of this idea is fully recognized. The new state must rest on a true conception of the individual. Let us ask ourselves therefore for a further definition of individuality than that already implied.

The individual is the unification of a multiplied variety of reactions. But the individual does not react to society. The interplay constitutes both society on the one hand and individuality on the other: individuality and society are evolving together from this constant and complex action and reaction. Or, more accurately, the relation of the individual to society is not action and reaction, but infinite interactions by which both individual and society are forever a-making: we cannot say if we would be exact that the individual acts upon and is acted upon, because that way of expressing it implies that he is a definite,
given, finished entity, and would keep him apart merely as an agent of the acting and being acted on. We cannot put the individual on one side and society on the other, we must understand the complete
interrelation of the two. Each has no value, no existence without the other. The individual is created by the social process and is daily nourished by that process. There is no such thing as a self-made man. What we think we possess as individuals is what is stored up from society, is the subsoil of social life. We soak up
and soak up and soak up our environment all the time.

Of what then does the individuality of a man consist? Of his relation to the whole, not (1) of his apartness nor (2) of his difference alone.

Of course the mistake which is often made in thinking of the individual is that of confusing the physical with the real individual. The physical individual is seen to be apart and therefore apartness is assumed of the psychic or real individual.
We think of Edward Fitzgerald as a recluse, that he got his development by being alone, that he was largely outside the influences of society. But imagine Fizgerald's life with his books. It undoubtedly did not suit his nature to mix freely with other people in bodily presence, but what a constant and vivid living with others his life really was. How closely he was in vital contact with the thoughts of men.

We must bear in mind that the social spirit itself may impose apartness on a man; the method of uniting with others is not always that of visible, tangible groups. The pioneer spirit is the creative spirit even if it seems to take men apart to fulfil its dictates. On the other hand the solitary man is not necessarily the man who lives alone; he may be one who lives constantly with others in all the complexity of modern city life, but who is so shut-up or so set upon his own ideas that he makes no real union with others.

Individuality is the capacity for union. The measure of individuality is the depth and breadth of true relation. I am an individual not so far as I am apart from but as far as I am a part of other men. Evil is non-relation. The source of our strength is the central supply. You man as well break a branch off the tree and expect it to live. Non-relation is death.

I have said that individuality consists neither of the separateness of one man from the other, nor of the differences of one man from the other. The second statement is challenged more often than the first. This comes from some confusion of ideas. My individuality is difference springing into view as relating itself
with other differences. The act of relating is the creating act.
It is vicious intellectualism to say, "Before you relate you must have things to relate, therefore the differences are more elemental: there are (1) differences which (2) unite, therefore uniting is secondary." The only fact, the only truth is the creative activity which appears as the great complex we call humanity. The activity of creating is all. It is only by _being_ this activity that we grasp it. To view it from the outside, to dissect it into its difference elements, to lay these elements on the dissecting table as so many different individuals, is to kill the life and feed the fancy with dead images, empty, sterile concepts. But let us set about relating ourselves to our community in fruitful fashion, and we shall see that our individuality is
bodying itself forth in stronger and stronger fashion, our difference shaping itself in exact conformity with the need of the work we do.

For we must remember when we say that the essence of individuality is the relating of self to other difference, that difference is not something static, something given, that it also is involved in the world of becoming. This is what experience teaches me -- that society needs my difference, not as an absolute,
but just so much difference as will relate me. Differences develop within the social process and are united through the social process. Difference which is not capable of relation is eccentricity. Eccentricity, caprice, put me outside, bring anarchy; true spontaneity, originality, belong not to chaos but to system. But spontaneity must be coordinated; irrelevancy produces nothing, is insanity. It is not my uniqueness which makes me of value to the whole but my power of relating. The nut and the screw form a perfect combination not because they are different, but because exactly fit into each other and together can perform a function which neither could perform alone, or which could perform half of alone or any part alone. It is not that the significance of the nut and screw is increased by their coming together, they have no significance at all unless they do come together. The fact that they have to be different to enter any fruitful relation with each other is a matter of derivative importance -- derived from the work they do.

Another illustration is that of the specialist. It is not a knowledge of his specialty which makes an expert of service to society, but his insight into the relation of his specialty to the whole. Thus it implies not less but more relation, because the entire value of that specialization is that it is part of something. Instead of isolating him and giving him a narrower life, it gives him at once a broader life because it binds him more
irrevocably to the whole. But the whole works both ways: the specialist not only contributes to the whole, but all his relations to the whole are embodied in his own particular work.

Thus difference is only a part of the life process. To exaggerate this part led to the excessive and arrogant
individualism of the nineteenth century. It behooves us children of the twentieth century to search diligently after the law of unity that we may effectively marshal and range under its dominating sway all the varying diversities of life.

Our definition of individuality must now be "finding my place in the whole": "my place" gives you the individual, "the whole" gives you society, but by connecting them, by saying "my place in the whole," we get a fruitful synthesis. I have tried hard to get away from any mechanical system and yet it is difficult to find words which do not seem to bind. I am now afraid of this expression -- my place in the whole. It has a rigid, unyielding sound, as if I were a cog in a machine. But my place is not a definite portion of space and time. The people who believe in their "place" in this sense can always photograph their "places." But my place is a matter of individual relation, and of infinitely changing relation so that it can never be captured. It is neither the anarchy of particularism nor the rigidity of the German machine. To know my
place is not to know my niche, not to know whether I am cog no. 3 or cog no. 4; it is to be alive at every instant at every finger tip to every contact and to be conscious of those contacts.

We see now that the individual both seeks the whole and is the whole.

First, the individual, biology tells us, is never complete, completeness spells death; social psychology is beginning to show us that man advances toward completeness not by further aggregations to himself, but by further and further relatings of self to other men. We are always reaching forth for union; most, perhaps all our desires have this motive. The spirit craves totality, this is the motor of social progress; the process of getting it is not by adding more and more to ourselves, but by offering more and more of ourselves. Not appropriation but contribution is the law of growth. What our special contribution is, it is for us to discover. More and more to release the potentialities of the individual means the more and more progressive organization of society if at the same time we are learning how to coordinate all the variations. The individual in wishing for more wholeness does not ask for a chaotic mass, but for the orderly wholeness which we call unity. The test of our vitality is our power of synthesis, of life synthesis.

But although we say that the individual is never complete, it is also true that the individual is a being who, because his function is relating and his relatings are infinite, is in himself the whole of society. It is not that the whole is divided up into pieces; the individual is the whole at one point. This is the incarnation: it is the whole flowing into me, transfusing, suffusing me. The fulness, bigness of my life is not measured by the amount I do, nor the number of people I meet, but how far the whole is expressed through me. This is the reason why unifying gives me a sense of life and more unifying gives me a sense of more life -- there is
more of the whole and of me. My worth to society is not how valuable a part I am. I am not unique in the world because I am different from any one else, but because I am a whole seen from a special point of view [1].

1. This is the principle of the vote in a democracy (see ch. XXI). This must not, however, be confused with the old Hegelianism (see ch. XXIX on "Sovereignty").

That the relation of each to the whole is dynamic and not static is perhaps the most profound truth which recent years have brought us [2].

2. In art this is what impressionism has meant. In the era before impressionism art was in a static phase, that is, artists were working at fixed relations. The "balance" of modern artists does not suggest fixedness, but relation subject directly to the laws of the whole.

We now see that when I give my share I give always far more than my share, such are the infinite complexities, the fulness and fruitfulness of the interrelatings. I contribute to society my mite, and then society contains not just that much more nourishment, but as much more as the loaves and fishes which fed
the multitude outnumbered the original seven and two. My contribution meets some particular need not because it can be measured off against that need, but because my contribution by means of all the cross currents of life always has so much more than itself to offer. When I withhold my contribution, therefore,
I am withholding far more than my personal share. When I fail some one or some cause, I have not failed just that person, just that cause, but the whole world is thereby crippled. This thought gives an added solemnity to the sense of personal responsibility.

To sum up: individuality is a matter primarily neither of apartness nor of difference, but of each finding his own activity in the whole. In the many times each day that we think of ourselves it is not one time in a thousand that we think of our eccentricities, we are thinking indirectly of those qualities which join us to others; we think of the work we are doing with others and what is expected of us, the people we are going to play with when work is over and the part we are going to take in that play, the committee-meeting we are going to attend and what we are going to do there. Every distinct act of the ego is an affirmation of that amount of separateness which makes for perfect union. Every affirmation of the ego establishes my relation with all the rest of the universe. It is one and the same act which establishes my
individuality and gives me my place in society. Thus an individual is one who is being created _by_ society, whose daily breath is drawn _from_ society, whose life is spent _for_ society. When we recognize society as self-unfolding, self-unifying activity, we shall hold ourselves open to its influence, letting the Light
stream into us, not from an outside source, but from the whole of which we are a living part. It is eternally due us that that whole should feed and nourish and sustain us at every moment, but it cannot do this unless at every moment we are creating it. This perfect interplay is Life. To speak of the "limitations of the
individual" is blasphemy and suicide. The spirit of the whole is incarnate in every part. "For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate" -- the individual from society.

Chapter VIII
Who is the Free Man?

The idea of liberty long current was that the solitary man was the free man, that the man outside society possessed freedom but that in society he had to sacrifice as much as his liberty as interfered with the liberty of others. Rousseau's effort was to find a form of society in which all should be as free as "before." According to some of our contemporary thinkers liberty is what belongs to the individual or variation-giving-one. But this tells only half the tale. Freedom is the harmonious, unimpeded working of the law of
one's own nature. The true nature of every man is found only in the whole. A man is ideally free only so far as he is interpermeated by every other human being; he gains his freedom through a perfect and complete relationship because thereby he achieves his whole nature.

Hence free-will is not caprice or whim or a partial wish or a momentary desire. On the contrary freedom means exactly the liberation from the tyranny of such particularist impulses. When the whole-will has supreme dominion in the heart of man, then there is freedom. The mandate of our real Self is our liberty. The essence of freedom is not irrelevant spontaneity but the fullness of relation. We do not curtail our liberty by joining with others; we find it and increase all our capacity for life through the interweaving of willings. It is only in a complex state of society that any large degree of freedom is possible, because nothing else can supply the many opportunities necessary to work out freedom.
The social process is a completely Self-sufficing process. Free- will is one of its implications. I am free for two reasons: (1) I am not dominated by the whole because I *am* the whole; (2) I am not dominated by "others" because we have the genuine social process only when I do not control others or they me, but all
intermingle to produce the collective thought and the collective will. I am free when I am functioning here in time and space as the creative will.

There is no extra-Will: that is the vital lesson for us to learn.
There is no Will except as we act. Let us be the Will. Thereby do we become the Free-Will.

Perhaps the most superficial of all views is that free-will consists in choice when an alternative is presented. But freedom by our definition is obedience to the law of one's nature. My nature is of the whole: I am free, therefore, only when I choose that term in the alternative, which the whole commands. I am not free when I am making choices, I am not free when my acts are not "determined," for in a sense they always are determined (freedom and determinism have not this kind of opposition). I am free when
I am creating. I am determined *through* my will, not in spite of it.

Freedom then is the identifying of the individual will with the whole will--the supreme activity of life. Free the spirit of man and then we can trust the spirit of man, and is not the very essence of this freeing of the spirit of man the process of taking him from the self-I to the group-I? That we are free only through
the social order, only as fast as we identify ourselves with the whole, implies practically that to gain our freedom we must take part in all the life around us: join groups, enter into many social relations, and begin to win freedom for ourselves. When we are the group in feeling, thought and will, we are free: it does what it wishes through us--that is our liberty. In a democracy the training of every child from the cradle--in nursery, school, at play--must be a training in group consciousness.

Then we shall have the spontaneous activity of freedom. Let us not be martyrs. Let us not give up bread and coal that the ends of the Great War may be won, with the feeling of a restricted life, but with the feeling that we have gained thereby a fuller life.
Let us joyously do the work of the world because we are the world.
Such is the *elan de vie*, the joy of high activity, which leaps forward with force, in freedom.

We have to begin to-day to live the life which will give us freedom. Savants and plain men have affirmed the freedom of the will, but at the same time most of us, even while loudly claiming our freedom, have felt bound. While determinism has many theoretical adherents, it has many more practical ones; we have
considered ourselves bound in thousands of ways--by tradition, by religion, by natural law, by inertia and ignorance, etc. etc. We have said God is free but man is not free. That we are not free has been the most deadening fallacy to which man has ever submitted. No outside power indeed can make us free. No document of our forefathers can "declare" us "independent." No one can ever give us freedom, but we can win it for ourselves.

It is often thought that when some restraint is taken away from us we are freer than before, but this is childish. Some women-suffragists talk of women as "enslaved" and advocate their emancipation by the method of giving them the vote. But the vote will not make women free. Freedom is always a thing to be
attained. And we must remember too that freedom is not a static condition. As it is not something possessed "originally," and as it is not something which can be given to us, so also it is not something won once for all. It is in our power to win our freedom, but it must be won anew at every moment, literally every moment.
People think of themselves as not free because they think of themselves as obeying some external law, but the truth is *we* are the law-makers. My freedom is my share in creating, my part in the creative responsibility. The heart of our freedom is the impelling power of the will of the whole.

Who then are free? Those who *win* their freedom through fellowship.

The new freedom is to be founded on the new individualism. Many people in their zeal for a "socialized" life are denouncing "individualism." But individualism is the latest social movement.
We must guard against the danger of thinking that the individual is less important because the collective aspect of life has aroused our ardor and won our devotion. Collectivism is no short cut to do away with the necessity of individual achievement; it means the greatest burden possible on every man. The development of a truly social life takes place at the same time that the freedom and power and efficiency of its members develop. The individual on the other hand can never make his individuality effective until he is given collective scope for his activity. We sometimes hear it said that the strong man does not like combination, but in fact the stronger the man the more he sees cooperation with others as the fitting
field for his strength.

But we must learn the method of a real cooperation. We cannot have any genuine collectivism until we have learned how to evolve the collective thought and the collective will. This can be done only by every one taking part. The fact that the state owns the means of production may be a good or a poor measure, but it is not necessarily collectivism or a true socialism. The wish for socialism is a longing for the ideal state, but it is embraced often by impatient people who want to take a short cut to the ideal state. That state must be grown--its branches will widen as its roots spread. The socialization of property must not precede the socialization of the will. If it does, then the only difference between socialism and our present order will be substituting one machine for another. We see more and more collectivism coming; so far as it keeps pace with the socialization of the will, it is good; so far as it does not, it is purely mechanical. Some
people's idea of socialism is inventing a machine to grind out your duties for you. But every man must do his work for himself. Not socialization of property, but socialization of the will is the true socialism.

The main aim in the reconstruction of society must be to get all that every man has to give, to bring the submerged millions into light and activity. Those of us who are basing all our faith on the constructive vision of a collective society are giving the fullest value to the individual that has ever been given, are
preaching individual value as the basis of democracy, individual affirmation as its process, and individual responsibility as its motor force. True individualism has been the one thing lacking either in motive or actuality in a so-called individualistic age, but then it has not been an individualistic but a particularistic
age. True individualism is this moment piercing through the soil of our new understanding of the collective life.