As biology, thus treating the entire organic nature of man, becomes an individual psycho-physics, so must sociology, treating the wider organic nature of man, become a collective psychophysics.While then the respective importance of the welfare of the individual and of society may still be difficult to define, the admission of society as a psycho-physical structure, with human ends of its own, will involve its proper recognition in the appraisement of every sort of human value.Our task, that of devising a method of valuation of industry, will evidently demand that economic processes shall be considered, not only in their bearing upon individual lives, but in their bearing upon the welfare of society.Indeed, it is difficult to see how any reasonable person can confront the grave practical problems presented by the industrial societies of to-day, such as those contained in individual, class, sex, national differentiation of economic functions, without realising that the hypothesis of humanity as itself a collective organism can alone furnish any hope of their rational solution.
The significance of the organic conception in any human valuation of industrial acts or products is evident.It requires us to value each act or product both from the standpoint of the individual and of the society to which he belongs, and it furnishes a harmony of the two areas of interest.
The baffling problems everywhere presented to thought by the apparent contradiction of the unity and the diversity of nature, the whole and the parts, the general and the particular, find their clearest practical solution in the fact and consciousness of man's social nature, his recognition that in feeling and in action he is both an individual and a member of a number of social groups, expanding in a series of concentric circles from family and city to humanity, and in dimmer outline to some larger cosmic organism.
For our economic valuation, the harmony of this narrower and wider treatment of human nature is of profound and obvious importance.It will require us, in considering the vital costs and satisfactions involved in the production and consumption of goods, to have regard to their effects, not only upon the individuals who produce and consume the goods, but upon the city, nation, or other society to which they belong.Human welfare will be not merely the welfare of human beings taken as an aggregate, but of society regarded as an organic unity.The most delicate economic and spiritual issues of adjustment will be found to relate to the provisions for harmonising the order and the growth of the narrower and the wider organisms.While, then, biology has in the past been too arrogant in pressing distinctively physical implications of the term 'organism' into the dawning science of sociology, and in distorting the true conception of social evolution by enforcing narrow interpretations of selection and survival, this is no ground for refusing to utilise the terminology which, better than any other, expresses the relations of parts to wholes in every sort of living substance.
The contradictions of Production and Consumption, Cost and Utility, Physical and Spiritual Welfare, Individual and Social Welfare, all find their likeliest mode of reconcilement and of harmony in the treatment of society as an organism.
NOTES:
1.Labour employed in productive work of industry is usually excluded from the category of national 'wealth,' though it is sometimes regarded as 'personal wealth'.
But there is no sufficient reason for this exclusion.Any increase of the efficiency of the labour of a nation is evidently as much an increase of its total vendible resources as an increase in its instrumental capital would be.
2.Exchange is simply an ordinary branch of production, mainly consisting of wholesale and retail trade.Distribution has, of course, another and an important economic signification, being applied to the laws determining the apportionment of the product.
3.The Common-sense of Political Economy.
4.Munera Pulveris , §XL.
5.How potent a source of intellectual confusion this separation of producer and consumer is, may be best illustrated from the commonly accepted treatment of the theory of taxation, which regards 'consumers' as a different class of beings from 'producers' for purposes of incidence of taxes.
NOTE.There are doubtless those who will remain dissatisfied with this insistence upon the extension of organism and the conception of the humanly desirable in terms of 'organic' welfare.They would insist that the conscious personality of an individual or of a society transcends organism, as the latter does mechanism, and that our standard and measure of welfare should be expressed in psychical terms of personality.This point of view has recently been concisely and powerfully restated by Dr.Haldane ( Mechanism, Life and Personality ).But though there is much to say for treating personality as the intrinsic quality of our humanist standard, I decided against the course on a balance of intellectual expediency, preferring to retain the clearness and force of the organic concept while spiritualising it to meet the requirements of ascending life.
