In the same way as the emotions fear, anger, and hate, and their variations and degrees, may be aroused by attack or threat against the self, so help and encouragement of an individual's selfhood arouse love, affection, and gratitude. Even our affection for our parents, though in part instinctive, is undoubtedly increased by the care and persistence with which they have fostered our own life and hopes, have educated us, and made possible for us a career. The same motives play a part in our affection for teachers who have beneficently influenced our lives, for other older people who 'give us a start', or advice and encouragement. Even the love of God has in religious ritual been colored with gratitude for God's mercies and benevolences.

The Individuality of Groups

Groups may display the same individuality and sense of selfhood as is exhibited by individuals. And the members of the group may come to regard the group life as something quite as important and inalienable as their own personalities and possessions. Indeed in defense of the integrity of, the group life, as in the case, for example, of national honor, the individual life and possession may come to be reckoned as naught. Man's gregariousness and his instinctive sympathy with his own kind make it easy for the individual to identify his own life with that of the group. What threatens or endangers the group will in consequence arouse in him the same emotions as are aroused by threats or dangers that concern his own personality. An insult to the flag may send a thrill of danger through the millions who read about it, just as would an insult to themselves or their families.

Group feeling may exist on various levels. It may be nothing more momentous than local pride, having the tallest tower, the finest amusement park, the best baseball team, or being the 'sixth largest city'. It may be a belligerent imperialism, a 'desire for a place in the sun'. It may be a desire for independence and an autonomous group life, manifested so strikingly recently by the small nationalities Poland and Czecho-Slavia, and influential in keeping Switzerland alive as

a nationality through hundreds of years, though surrounded by powerful neighbors.28 While a group does not exist save as an abstraction, looked at as a whole it may exhibit the same outstanding traits, or the same types of selfhood as an individual. It may be fiercely belligerent and dogmatic; it may, like literary exponents of the German ideal, desire to spread its own conception of Kultur throughout the world.29 It may be insistent on its own position, or its own possessions or its own glory. It may be fanatic in aggrandizement. It may be interested in the welfare of other groups, as in the case of large nationalities, championing and protecting the causes of small or oppressed ones, such an ideal as was expressed, for example, by President Wilson in his address to Congress on the entrance of America into the Great War:

We shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts-for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free." 30

The selfhood displayed by various groups varies with the degree and integration of the individual within the group. In extreme cases, such as that of Germany under the imperial régime, the group individuality may completely overshadow and engulf that of the individual. This ideal was not infrequently expressed by German political writers:

To us the state is the most indispensable as well as highest requisite of our earthly existence. . . All indivualistic endeavor must be unreservedly subordinated to this lofty claim. The state eventually is of infinitely more value than the sum of the individ

28 Group feeling may be displayed under the most disadvantageous conditions, as in the strong sentiment for nationalism current among the Jews, even through all the centuries of dispersion.

29 Thorstein Veblen in The Nature of Peace has pointed out how the 'common man' comes to identify his interest with that of the group: "The common man who so lends himself to the aggressive enhancement of the national culture, and its prestige has nothing of a material value to gain from the increase of renown that comes to his sovereign, his language, his art and his countrymen's art or science, his dietary, or his God. There are no sordid motives in all this. These spiritual assets of self-complacency are to be rated as grounds of high-minded patriotism without afterthought."

20 Woodrow Wilson: Address to Congress, April 2, 1919.

uals within its jurisdiction. This conception of the state which is as much a part of our life as the blood in our veins, is nowhere to be found in the English constitution, and is quite foreign to English thought, and to that of America as well.31

While custom-bound and feudal régimes may emphasize the tendency to suppress development of individuality, and insist on regimentation in thought and action-an ideal proclaimed with increasing generality in Germany from Hegel down32 there may be on the part of both individuals and groups the tendency to promote individuality as itself a social good. In such a case the social structure and educational systems and methods will be designed to promote individuality rather than to suppress it. Individual variations, if it be generally recognized that they are the only source of progress, will be utilized and cultivated instead of suppressed.33

Throughout the nineteenth century (indeed throughout the history of political theory), the pendulum swung between individualism and complete socialization. Spencer long ago proclaimed the dominance of the individual; T. H. Green, following the German philosophers, the dominance of the State. Like the contrast between Egoism and Altruism, an emphasis on either side is bound to be artificial. The individual can only be a self in a social order; the individual is only an individual in contrast with others. It is doubtful, for example, whether a man living all his life alone on a desert island would discover any individuality at all. A man's character is displayed in action, and his actions are always, or nearly always, performed with reference to other people. And a man's best self-realization cannot be achieved save in congenial social order. A man will not readily grow into a saint among a society of sinners, and unless the social order provides opportunities for the highest type of life, it will exist only in a very fortunate and favored few. One of the charges that has been laid against democracy is that it fails to encourage the highest

Eduard Meyer: England, Its Political Organization and Development and the War Against Germany (English Translation), pp. 30-31.

32 See Dewey: German Philosophy and Politics.

23 Individuality is the theme of Montessori kindergarten methods.

types of scientific and artistic interests, that it is the gospel of the mediocre.

It is too often forgotten, on the other hand, by those who emphasize the importance of society, that society is, after all, nothing more than an aggregate of selves. The 'state', the 'social order' is nothing but the individuals who make it up, and their relations to each other.

The group exists, after all, even as the most completely socialized political doctrines insist for the realization of individual selves, for freedom of opportunity and initiative. It is when 'individualism' runs rampant, when self-realization on the part of one individual interferes with self-realization on the part of all others that individualism becomes a menace. Individuality is itself valuable, in the first place, because as Mill pointed out in his essay on Liberty earlier quoted:

What has made the European family an improving instead of a staionary portion of mankind? Not any superior excellence in them, which, when it exists, exists as the effect, not the cause; but their remarkable diversity of character and culture. Individuals, classes, nations, have been extremely unlike one another, have struck out a great variety of paths, each leading to something valuable; and although at every period those who traveled in different paths have been intolerant of one another, and each would have thought it an excellent thing if all the rest could have been compelled to travel his road, their attempts to thwart each other's development have seldom been successful, and each has endured to receive the good which the others have offered.34

Secondly, apart from the progressive variations which individuality makes possible, it is itself an asset both to the individual himself and to others. It makes, as already pointed out, a person rather than a machine. It gives color and contrast to experience, and insures originality and spontaneity as opposed to the set formalism of a customary routine.

4 This is the essence of the aristocratic position, that a choice life lived by a few is better than a vulgar one shared by the many.

CHAPTER X

LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION 1

It was earlier pointed out that human beings alone possess language. They alone can make written symbols and heard sounds stand for other things, for objects, actions, qualities, and ideas. In this chapter the consideration of language may best be approached from the spoken tongue, under the influence of which, except in the simplest type of pictorial writing, the written form develops.2

From the point of view of the student of behavior, language, spoken language especially, is a habit, acquired like walking or swimming. It is made possible primarily by the fact that human beings possess a variety and flexibility of vocal reflexes possessed by no other animal. All the higher animals have a number of vocal reflexes, which are called out primarily in the expression of emotion or desire. Cries of pain, hunger, rage, sex desire or desire for companionship, are common to a great number of the animal species. But these cries and vocal utterances are limited, and comparatively unmodifiable. They are moreover expressed, so far as experimental observation can reveal, with no consciousness of the specific significance of particular sounds and are used as the involuntary expression of emotion rather than as a specific means of communication. the primates have a much larger number of such vocal instincts than the other mammals, and a much larger number of stimuli can call them out, e. g., injury to bodily tissues calls out one group; hunger calls out a certain group; sex stimuli (mate, etc.) another; and similarly cold, swiftly moving objects, tones, strange animals call out others. When attachments are formed between the female and her offspring another large group is called into action. There is no evidence to show in the case of mammals that these vocal instincts are modified by the sounds of other animals. . . These throat habits

1 Much of the technical material for this chapter is drawn from Leonard Bloomfield's: The Study of Language, and W. D. Whitney's: The Life and Growth of Language.

2 Bloomfield, pp. 7-8.