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.23 We now see that when I give my share I give always far more than my share, such are the infinite complexities, the fullness 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 a 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.
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 of 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.
