For once conceive Society as a being capable of thought and feeling, these processes have an interest for it.They are social art, part of the collective life in which Society realises itself, just as the individual realises himself in individual art.Once accept the view of Society not as a mere set of social institutions, or a network of relations, but as a collective personality, the great routine industrial processes become the vital functions of this collective being, interesting to that being alike in their performance and their product.That subdivision of labour and that apparent contradiction of interests between producer and consumer which seem designed to feed personal antagonisms and to thwart individuality, now acquire rational justification as the complex adaptive play of healthy vital functions in Society.
§5.Labour, thus interpreted, becomes a truly social function, the orderly half-instinctive half-rational activity by which society helps itself and satisfies its wants, a common tide of productive energy which pulses through the veins of humanity, impelling the individual members of society to perform their part as contributors to the general life.Whether those individual actions are strictly voluntary, pleasurable and interesting in themselves to those who perform them, as in the finer arts, or are compulsory in their main incidence upon the individual, and accompanied by little interest or social feeling on his part, is a matter of quite secondary importance as viewed from the social standpoint.As labour is social, so is capital.The other apparent discrepancy, that between the interests of present and future, spending and saving, also disappears when we consider the social significance of saving.For society secretes capital by the same half-instinctive half-rational process by which it generates, directs and distributes, its supply of labour.Only by a hypothesis which thus assigns a central industrial purpose to society can we possibly understand the life of industry and the complex cooperation it displays.
Take for a single instance the wheat supply of the world -- or the cotton industry of Lancashire.We see large rhythmic actions, elaborate in their complicated flows, responsive to innumerable stimuli of world-markets, -- a nervous system of affluent and effluent currents, directed by the desires and beliefs of innumerable producers and consumers, each consciously actuated by his own particular motives and yet cooperating towards large social ends.
We can neither grasp, intellectually or emotionally, the human or social significance of these processes, if we persist in resolving them into the ideas, feelings and actions of individual persons.The harmony becomes either fortuitous or purely mystical.But, if we regard Society as having a large life of its own, the cooperative harmony of individual aims and activities becomes a corporate organic process.The social life does not suffer from division of labour and specialisation of function, but gains, as in the animal organism.The social life is not oppressed, degraded or injured by the routine of the smaller working lives, any more than the animal organism by the regularity and repetition of the respiratory, circulating and other routine operations of its organs and their cells.
