The ability to hand down wealth in durable form places a premium on its acquirement. Ambition has more stuff to work with. A more definite, assertive self is gradually built up. "Good" comes to have added meaning with every new want that awakes. The individual is not satisfied any longer to take the group's valuation. He wants to get his own good in his own way. And it will often seem to him that he can get his own good most easily and surely either by keeping out of the common life or by using his fellow men to his own advantage. Men of culture have frequently shown their selfishness in the first way; men of wealth in the second. An aristocracy of culture, or birth, or wealth may come to regard the whole process of civilization as properly ministering to the wants of the select few. Nearly every people which has developed the arts and sciences has developed also an aristocracy. In the ancient world slavery was a part of the process. In modern times other forms of exploitation may serve the purpose better. Individualism, released from the ties which bound up the good of one with the good of all, tends to become exclusive and selfish; civilization with all its opportunities for increasing happiness and increasing life has its moral risks and indirectly, at least, its moral evils.
These evils may appear as the gratification of sense and appetite and thus may be opposed to the higher life of the spirit, which needs no outer objects or luxuries. Or they may appear as rooted in selfishness, in the desire for gratifying the exclusive self of material interests or ambition, as over against sympathy, justice, and kindness, which mark a broadly human and social life. In both cases serious men have sought to overcome by some form of "self-denial" the evils that attend on civilization, even if they are not due to it.
3. Military Forces.—The kinship group is a protection so long as it has to contend only with similar groups. The headlong valor and tribal loyalty of German or Scottish clans may even win conflicts with more disciplined troops of Rome or England. But permanent success demands higher organization than the old clans and tribes permitted. Organization means authority, and a single directing, controlling commander or king. As Egypt, Assyria, Phœnicia show their strength the clans of Israel cry, "Nay, but we will have a king over us; that we may also be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles."[43] Wars afford the opportunity for the strong and unscrupulous leader to assert himself. Like commerce they may tend also to spread culture and thus break down barriers of ancient custom. The conquests of Babylon and Alexander, the Crusades and the French Revolution, are instances of the power of military forces to destroy old customs and give individualism new scope. In most cases, it is true, it is only the leader or "tyrant" who gets the advantage. He uses the whole machinery of society for his own elevation. Nevertheless custom and group unity are broken for all. Respect for law must be built new from the foundation.
4. Religious Forces.—While in general religion is a conservative agency, it is also true that a new religion or a new departure in religion has often exercised a powerful influence on moral development. The very fact that religion is so intimately bound up with all the group mores and ideals, makes a change in religion bear directly on old standards of life. The collision between old and new is likely to be fundamental and sharp. A conception of God may carry with it a view of what conduct is pleasing to him. A doctrine as to the future may require a certain mode of life. A cultus may approve or condemn certain relations between the sexes. Conflicting religions may then force a moral attitude in weighing their claims. The contests between Jehovah and Baal, between Orphic cults and the public Greek religion, between Judaism and Christianity, Christianity and Roman civilization, Christianity and Germanic religion, Catholicism and Protestantism, have brought out moral issues. We shall notice this factor especially in Chapters VI. and VIII.
§ 3. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL AGENCIES
The psychological forces which tend toward individualism have been already stated to be the self-assertive instincts and impulses. They are all variations of the effort of the living being first to preserve itself and then to rise to more complicated life by entering into more complex relations and mastering its environment. Spinoza's "sui esse conservare," Schopenhauer's "will to live," Nietzsche's "will to power," the Hebrew's passionate ideal of "life", and Tennyson's "More life, and fuller" express in varying degree the meaning of this elemental bent and process. Growing intelligence adds to its strength by giving greater capacity to control. Starting with organic needs, this developing life process may find satisfactions in the physical world in the increasing power and mastery over nature gained by the explorer or the hunter, the discoverer, the craftsman, or the artist. It is when it enters the world of persons that it displays a peculiar intensity that marks the passions of individualism par excellence. We note four of these tendencies toward self-assertion.
1. Sex.—The sex instinct and emotion occupies a peculiar position in this respect. On the one hand it is a powerful socializing agency. It brings the sexes together and is thus fundamental to the family. But on the other hand it is constantly rebelling against the limits and conventions established by the social group for its regulation. The statutes against illicit relations, from the codes of Hammurabi and Moses to the latest efforts for stricter divorce, attest the collision between the individual's inclination and the will of the group. Repeatedly some passion of sex has broken over all social, legal, and religious sanctions. It has thus been a favorite theme of tragedy from the Greeks to Ibsen. It finds another fitting medium in the romance. It has called into existence and maintains in every large city an outcast colony of wretched creatures, and the evils which attend are not limited in their results to those who knowingly take the risks. It has worked repeated changes in the structure of the family authorized by society. Its value and proper regulation were points at issue in that wide-reaching change of mores attendant upon the Reformation, and apparently equilibrium has not yet been reached.
2. The Demand for Possession and Private Property.—In the primitive group we have seen that there might be private property in tools or weapons, in cattle or slaves. There was little private property in land under the maternal clan; and indeed in any case, so long as the arts were undeveloped, private property had necessary limits. The demand for private property is a natural attendant upon individual modes of industry. As we have said, it was a common principle that what the group produced was owned by the group, and what the individual made or captured was treated as his. When individual industry came to count for more, the individual claimed more and more as private possession.
The change from the maternal clan to the paternal family or household was a reënforcement to the individual control of property. The father could hand down his cattle or his house to his son. The joint family of India is indeed a type of a paternal system. Nevertheless the tendency is much stronger to insist on individual property where the father's goods pass to his son than where they go to his sister's children.
The chiefs or rulers were likely to gain the right of private property first. Among certain families of the South Slavs to-day, the head has his individual eating utensils, the rest share. Among many people the chiefs have cattle which they can dispose of as they will; the rest have simply their share of the kin's goods. The old Brehon laws of Ireland show this stage.
But however it comes about, the very meaning of property is, in the first place, exclusion of others from some thing which I have. It is therefore in so far necessarily opposed to group unity, opposed to any such simple solidarity of life as we find in group morality. As the American Indian accepts land in severalty, the old group life, the tribal restraints and supports, the group custom and moral unity that went with it, are gone. He must find a new basis or go to pieces.
3. Struggles for Mastery or Liberty.—In most cases these cannot be separated from economic struggles. Masters and slaves were in economic as well as personal relations, and nearly all class contests on a large scale have had at least one economic root, whatever their other sources. But the economic is not their only root. There have been wars for glory or for liberty as well as for territory or booty or slaves. As the struggle for existence has bred into the race the instinct of self-defense with its emotion of anger, the instinct to rivalry and mastery, and the corresponding aversion to being ruled, so the progress of society shows trials of strength between man and man, kin and kin, tribe and tribe.