Part 20 (2/2)
and by ”chair” his listener understood what we commonly mean by the word ”table,” communication would be impossible.
There must be some common agreement in the words used. In the case of simple terms referring to concrete objects there are continual concrete reminders of the meaning of a word. We do not make mistakes as to the meaning of words such as chair, river, stone, stove, books, forks, knives, because we so continually meet and use them. We are continually checked up, and the meanings we attach to these cannot go far astray.
But the further terms are removed from physical objects, the more opportunity is there for ambiguity. In the realm of politics and morals, as Socrates was fond of pointing out, the chief difficulties and misunderstandings of men have come from the ambiguities of the terms they use. ”Justice,” ”liberty,”
”democracy,” ”good,” ”true,” ”beautiful,” these have been immemorial bones of contention among philosophers.
They are accepted, taken for granted, without any question as to their meaning by the individual, until he finds, perhaps, in discussion that his acceptation of the term is entirely different from that of his opponent. Thus many an argument ends with ”if that's what you mean, I agree with you.” Intellectual inquiry and discussion to be fruitful must have certain definitive terms to start with.
Discussion ... needs to have the ground or basis of its various component statements brought to consciousness in such a way as to define the exact value of each. The Socratic contention is the need compelling the common denominator, the common subject, underlying the diversity of views to exhibit itself. It alone gives a sure standard by which the claims of all a.s.sertions may be measured.
Until this need is met, discussion is a self-deceiving play with unjudged, unexamined matters, which, confused and s.h.i.+fting, impose themselves upon us.[1]
[Footnote 1: Dewey: _Essays in Experimental Logic_, p. 200.]
To define our terms means literally to know _what_ we are talking about and what others are talking about. One of the values of discussion is that it enables us more clearly to realize the meaning of the words with which we constantly operate.
A man may entertain for a long while a half-conscious definition of democracy as meaning political equality, and suddenly come face to face with another who means by it industrial cooperation and partic.i.p.ation on the part of all workers.
Whether he agrees with the new definition or not, at least his own becomes clearer by contrast.
”Science,” wrote Condillac, ”is a well-made language.”
No small part of the technique of science lies in its clear definition of its terms. The chemist knows what he means by an ”acid,” the biologist by a ”mammal.” Under these names he cla.s.sifies all objects having certain determinable properties.
Social science will never attain the precision of the physical sciences until it also attains as clear and unambiguous a terminology. As we shall see in the chapter on science, however, the definitions in the physical sciences are arrived at through precise inquiries not yet possible in the field of social phenomena.
CHAPTER XI
RACIAL AND CULTURAL CONTINUITY
That the history of the race is an unbroken continuum goes without saying. What this means in the way of transmission of the arts, the sciences, the religion, the ideas, the customs of one generation to the next, we shall presently see. Cultural continuity is made possible by the more fundamental fact of the actual biological continuity of the race. This biological continuity extends back, as far as we can infer from the scientific evidence, unbrokenly through the half million years since man has left traces of his presence on earth. The continuity of life itself goes back to that still more remote time when man and ape were indistinguishable, indeed to that postulated epoch when life as it existed on earth was no more complex than it is as it now appears in the one-celled animal.
Evolution has taught us that life, however it started, has been one long continuous process which has increased in complexity from the unicellular animals to man.
The continuity of the human race is a contrivance of nature rather than of man. It is, as it were, a by-product of the s.e.x instinct. Man is endowed natively with a powerful desire for s.e.x gratification, and though offspring are the chief utility of this instinct, desire for reproduction is not normally its primary stimulus. But while the production of offspring may thus be said to be an incidental result of the s.e.x instinct, human reproduction may be subjected to rational consideration and control, according as offspring are or are not considered desirable.
The sense of the desirability of offspring may, in the first place, be determined by social rather than individual considerations.
To the group or the state a large birth-rate, a steady increase of the number of births over the number of deaths, may be made desirable by the need of a large population for agriculture, herding, or war. In primitive tribes, superiority in numbers must have been, under conditions of compet.i.tive warfare, a p.r.o.nounced a.s.set. In any imperialistic regime, where military conquest is highly regarded, the maintenance and replenishment of large armies is a factor that has entered into reflection on the question of population.
In cases where a small ruling cla.s.s is benefited by the labor of a slave or serf cla.s.s, there is, at least for the ruling cla.s.ses, a marked utility in the increase in population. It means just so much opportunity for increase of wealth on the part of landowning and slaveholding or serf-controlling cla.s.ses. In any country, increase in the labor supply means just so much more human energy for the control of natural resources, so many more units of energy for the production of national wealth.
Offspring may come to be reflectively desired by the individual as a means of perpetuating property, family, or fame.
A man cannot nonchalantly face the prospect of obliteration, and the biological fact of death may be circ.u.mvented by the equally real fact of reproduction. A man's individuality, we have already had occasion to see, is enhanced by his possessions, and if his fortune or estate is handed down he shall not altogether have been obliterated from the earth. Similarly, where a family has become a great tradition, there may be a deliberate desire on the part of an individual to have the name and tradition carried on, to keep the old lineage current and conspicuous among men. A man may think through his children to keep his own fame alive in posterity. At least his name shall be known, and if, as so often happens, a son follows in his father's profession, carries on his father's business, farm, or philanthropies, the individual attains at least some measure of vicarious immortality. His own ways, habits, traditions are carried on.
A man may, moreover, come to desire offspring for the pleasures and responsibilities of domesticity and parenthood.
There is a parental instinct as such, certainly very strong in most women, and not lacking to some degree in most men.
The joys of caring for and rearing a child have too often been celebrated in literature and in life by parents both young and old to need more explicit statement here.
RESTRICTION OF POPULATION. But reproduction has been in human history promiscuous, and increase of population has been less a problem to moralists and economists than has its restriction. The danger of over-increase in population was first powerfully stated by Malthus in his _Essay on Population_.
Malthus contended in effect that population always tends to increase up to the limit of subsistence, and gives indications, unless increase is checked, of increasing beyond it. In its extreme form, as it appeared in Malthus's first edition of his _Essay_, it ran somewhat as follows:
As things are now, there is a perpetual pressure by population on the sources of food. Vice and misery cut down the number of men when they grow beyond the food. The increase of men is rapid and easy; the increase of food is in comparison, slow, and toilsome. They are to each other as a geometrical increase to an arithmetical; in North America, the population double their number in twenty years.[1]
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