This belief that processes which are consciously directed are necessarily superior to any spontaneous process is an unfounded superstition. It would be truer to say, as A. N. Whitehead has argued in another connection, that on the contrary ``civilization advances by extending the number of important operations we can perform without thinking about them.''9.1 If it is true that the spontaneous interplay of social forces sometimes solves problems no individual mind could consciously solve, or perhaps even perceives, and if they thereby create an ordered structure which increases the power of the individuals without having been designed by any one of them, they are superior to conscious action. Indeed, any social processes which deserve to be called ``social'' in distinction from the action of individuals are almost ex definitione not conscious. Insofar as such processes are capable of producing a useful order which could not have been produced by conscious direction, any attempt to make them subject to such direction would necessarily mean that we restrict what social activity can achieve to the inferior capacity of the individual mind.9.2
The full significance of this demand for universal conscious control will be seen most clearly if we consider it first in its most ambitious manifestation, even though this is as yet merely a vague aspiration and important mainly as a symptom: this is the application of the demand for conscious control to the growth of the human mind itself. This audacious idea is the most extreme result to which man has yet been led by the success of reason in the conquest of external nature. It has become a characteristic feature of contemporary thought and appears in what on a first view seem to be altogether different and even opposite systems of ideas. Whether it is the late L. T. Hobhouse who holds up to us ``the ideal of a collective humanity self-determining in its progress as the supreme object of human activity and the final standard by which the laws of conduct should be judged,''9.3or Dr. Joseph Needham who argues that ``the more control consciousness has over human affairs, the more truly human and hence super-human man will become,''9.4 whether it is the strict followers of Hegel who adumbrate the master's view of Reason becoming conscious of itself and taking control of its fate, or Dr. Karl Mannheim who thinks that ``man's thought has become more spontaneous and absolute than it ever was, since it now perceives the possibility of determining itself,''9.5 the basic attitude is the same. Though, according as these doctrines spring from Hegelian or positivist views, those who hold them form distinct groups that mutually regard themselves as completely different from and greatly superior to the other, the common idea that the human mind is, as it were, to pull itself up by its own bootstraps, springs from the same general approach: the belief that by studying human Reason from the outside and as a whole we can grasp the laws of its motion in a more complete and comprehensive manner than by its patient exploration from the inside, by actually following up the processes in which individual minds interact.
This pretension to be able to increase the powers of the human mind by consciously controlling its growth is thus based on the same theoretical view which claims to be able fully to explain this growth, a claim which implies the possession of a kind of supermind on the part of those who make it; and it is no accident that those who hold these theoretical views should also wish to see the growth of mind thus directed.
It is important to understand the precise sense in which the claim to be able to ``explain'' existing knowledge and beliefs must be interpreted in order to justify the aspirations based on it. For this purpose it would not be sufficient if we possessed an adequate theory which explained the principles on which the processes operate to which the growth of mind is due. Such knowledge of the mere principles (either a theory of knowledge or a theory of the social processes involved) will assist in creating conditions favorable to that growth, but could never provide a justification for the claim that it should be deliberately directed. This claim presupposes that we are able to arrive at a substantive explanation of why we hold the particular views we hold, of how our actual knowledge is determined by specific conditions. It is this which the ``sociology of knowledge'' and the various other derivatives of the ``materialist interpretation of history'' undertake when, for example, they ``explain'' the Kantian philosophy as the product of the material interests of the German bourgeoisie in the late eighteenth century, or whatever other similar theses they present.
We cannot enter here into a discussion of the reasons why even with respect to views now regarded as errors, and which on the basis of our better present knowledge we may in a sense be able to explain, that method does not really provide an explanation. The crucial point is that to attempt this with respect to our present knowledge involves a contradiction: if we knew how our present knowledge is conditioned or determined, it would no longer be our present knowledge. To assert that we can explain our own knowledge is to assert that we know more than we do know, a statement which is nonsense in the strict meaning of that term.9.6 There may, perhaps, be sense in the statement that to a greatly superior mind our present knowledge would appear as ``relative,'' or as conditioned in a certain manner by assignable circumstances. But the only conclusion we should be entitled to draw from this would be one opposite to that of the ``bootstrap theory of mental evolution'': it would be that on the basis of our present knowledge we are not in a position successfully to direct its growth. To draw any other conclusion than this, to derive from the thesis that human beliefs are determined by circumstances the claim that somebody should be given power to determine these beliefs, involves the claim that those who are to assume that power possess some sort of supermind. Those who hold these views have indeed regularly some special theory which exempts their own views from the same sort of explanation and which credits them, as a specially favored class, or simply as the ``free-floating intelligentsia,'' with the possession of absolute knowledge.
While in a sense this movement represents thus a sort of superrationalism, a demand for the direction of everything by a supermind, it prepares at the same time the ground for a thorough irrationalism. If truth is no longer discovered by observation, reasoning and argument, but by uncovering hidden causes which, unknown to the thinker, have determined his conclusions, if whether a statement is true or false is no longer decided by logical argument and empirical tests, but by examining the social position of the person who made it, when in consequence it becomes the membership of a class or race which secures or prevents the achievement of truth, and when in the end it is claimed that the sure instinct of a particular class or a people is always right, reason has been finally driven out.9.7 This is no more than the natural result of a doctrine which starts out with the claim that it can intuitively recognize wholes in a manner superior to the rational reconstruction attempted by Compositive social theory.
If it is true, moreover, as in their different ways both individualists and collectivists contend, that social processes can achieve things which it is beyond the power of the individual mind to achieve and plan, and that it is from those social processes that the individual mind derives what power it possesses, the attempt to impose conscious control on these processes must have even more fatal consequences. The presumptuous aspiration that ``reason'' should direct its own growth could in practice only have the effect that it would set limits to its own growth, that it would confine itself to the results which the directing individual mind can already foresee. Though this aspiration is a direct outcome of a certain brand of rationalism, it is, of course, the result of a misunderstood or misapplied rationalism which fails to recognize the extent to which individual reason is a product of interindividual relationships. Indeed, the demand that everything, including the growth of the human mind, should be consciously controlled is itself a sign of the inadequate understanding of the general character of the forces which constitute the life of the human mind and of human society. It is the extreme stage of these sell-destructive forces of our modern ``scientific'' civilization, of that abuse of reason whose development and consequences will be the central theme of the following historical studies.
It is because the growth of the human mind presents in its most general form the common problem of all the social sciences that it is here that minds most sharply divide, and that two fundamentally different and irreconcilable attitudes manliest themselves: on the one hand the essential humility of individualism, which endeavors to understand as well as possible the principles by which the efforts of individual men have in fact been combined to produce our civilization, and which from this understanding hopes to derive the power to create conditions favorable to further growth; and, on the other hand, the hubris of collectivism, which aims at conscious direction of all forces of society.
The individualist approach, in awareness of the constitutional limitations of the individual mind,9.8 attempts to show how man in society is able, by the use of various resultants of the social process, to increase his powers with the help of the knowledge implicit in them and of which he is never aware; it makes us understand that the only ``reason'' which can in any sense be regarded as superior to individual reason does not exist apart from the interindividual process in which, by means of impersonal media, the knowledge of successive generations and of millions of people living simultaneously is combined and mutually adjusted, and that this process is the only form in which the totality of human knowledge ever exists.
The collectivist method, on the other hand, not satisfied with the partial knowledge of this process from the inside, which is all the individual can gain, bases its demands for conscious control on the assumption that it can comprehend this process as a whole and make use of all knowledge in a systematically integrated form. It leads thus directly to political collectivism; though, logically, methodological collectivism and political collectivism are distinct, it is not difficult to see how the former leads to the latter and how, indeed, without methodological collectivism political collectivism would be deprived of its intellectual basis: without the pretension that conscious individual reason can grasp all the aims and all the knowledge of ``society'' or ``humanity,'' the belief that these aims are best achieved by conscious central direction loses its foundation. Consistently pursued it must lead to a system in which all members of society become merely instruments of the single directing mind and in which all the spontaneous social forces to which the growth of the mind is due are destroyed.9.9
It may indeed prove to be far the most difficult and not the least important task for human reason rationally to comprehend its own limitations. It is essential for the growth of reason that as individuals we should bow to forces and obey principles which we cannot hope fully to understand, yet on which the advance and even the preservation of civilization depend.9.10 Historically this has been achieved by the influence of the various religious creeds and by traditions and superstitions which made men submit to those forces by an appeal to his emotions rather than to his reason. The most dangerous stage in the growth of civilization may well be that in which man has come to regard all these beliefs as superstitions and refuses to accept or to submit to anything which he does not rationally understand. The rationalist whose reason is not sufficient to teach him those limitations of the powers of conscious reason, and who despises all the institutions and customs which have not been consciously designed, would thus become the destroyer of the civilization built upon them. This may well prove a hurdle which man will repeatedly reach, only to be thrown back into barbarism.
It would lead too far here to refer more than briefly to another field in which this same characteristic tendency of our age shows itself: that of morals. Here it is against the observance of any general and formal rules whose rationale is not explicitly demonstrated that the same kind of objections are raised. But the demand that every action should be judged after full consideration of all its consequences and not by any general rules is due to a failure to see that the submission to general rules, couched in terms of immediately ascertainable circumstances, is the only way in which for man with his limited knowledge freedom can be combined with the essential minimum degree of order. Common acceptance of formal rules is indeed the only alternative to direction by a single will man has yet discovered. The general acceptance of such a body of rules is no less important because they have not been rationally constructed. It is at least doubtful whether it would be possible in this way to construct a new moral code that would have any chance of acceptance. But so long as we have not succeeded in doing so, any general refusal to accept existing moral rules merely because their expediency has not been rationally demonstrated (as distinguished from the case when the critic believes he has discovered a better moral rule in a particular instance and is willing to brave public disapproval in testing it is to destroy one of the roots of our civilization.9.11