The individual and the environing society are the closest of blood relations, though we often allow ourselves, all too easily as has been said, to lose sight of the fact; they live under the same roof, and rely for sustenance on the same fare; and while to some the contradictions of life may be overlooked as personally impertinent and unimportant, being referred wholly to the environment, they are plainly the unavoidable heritage and the personal responsibility of every individual that counts himself a member of the human race. The objection, then, that was raised does not remove contradiction as a cause of doubt, but merely emphasizes what in a subsequent chapter must occupy us, the social aspect of experience.[2] Thus, not only does experience, in ways now coming to our view, teem with contradictions, and is contradiction a cause of doubt, but also experience so conditioned is social as well as individual, a matter of personal relations between man and man as well as a matter of the single person's inner responsibility. Society in its manifold classes, in its conflicts and in its history, may help us to see the whole of experience, the unity [p.044] of experience on all sides and in all parts, but it never does, and it never can, relieve the individual, or deprive the individual, of any side or part of what makes up an experience-whole. Grown men and women may be more definitely set in their lives and their ideas to certain specific things than children, but in no one, young or old, can such specialism ever be wholly exclusive of any of the other things.
To return to our immediate interest, if men are given to being doubters in their views about reality, spiritual and material; about unity or wholeness; about space and time, on the one hand fatally vast and independently real, and on the other formal and illusory; about causality, so actual and positive now, and yet so complete yesterday, or ever and ever so long ago; and about knowledge, so perfectly wise and so thoroughly vain and foolish; if, I say, men are double in all these different ways, in their moral judgments they seem, if possible, even more confused, and the confusion, the division against themselves, is the more serious for being with regard to what so directly concerns personal life and human fellowship.
