The point of these suggestions is to make it clear that, while plurality of human beings is necessary to enable society to cover the ground, as it were, which human nature is capable of covering, yet actual individuals are not ultimate or equal embodiments of the true particulars of the social universal. We thus see once more that the given individual is only in making, and that his reality may lie largely outside him. His will is not a whole, but implies and rests upon a whole, which is therefore the true nature of his will. We also gain some light on the unity of the social mind. For it seems plain that one actual human being may cover the ground, which, in other instances, it takes many men to occupy. And in some such examples--not, or not obviously, in those where a high intensity of genius is the essential quality--there seems little reason to distinguish the correlation of dispositions within the one person from the correlation of the same dispositions if dispersed among different persons. If I am my own gardener, or my own critic, or my own doctor, does the relation of the answering dispositions within my being differ absolutely and altogether from what { 178} takes place when gardener and master, critic and author, patient and doctor, are different persons? My instructions to my gardener are conveyed in language, it will be said, while I know my own wishes directly. And this is not the place to press the problem home either psychologically or metaphysically. But, just to induce reflection, it may be asked whether my instructions to myself are not as a rule conveyed and remembered in language. If we consider my unity with myself at different times as the limiting case, [1] we shall find it very hard to establish a difference of principle between the unity of what we call one mind and that of all the “minds” which enter into a single social experience.
In any case, we have said enough to suggest that Society _prima facie_ exists in the correlated dispositions by which a plurality of individual minds meets the need for covering the ground open to human nature, by division of labour in the fullest sense. But we have further pointed out that the true particularisation of the human universal does not necessarily coincide with the distinction between different persons, and that the correlation of differences and the identity which they constitute remain much the same whether they chance to fall within a single human being, or to be dispersed over several. The stress seems, therefore, to lie on the attainment of the true particularisation which does justice to the maximum of human capacity, rather than on the mere relations which arise between the members of a _de facto_ plurality. Not that the presence of human nature in any { 179} individual does not constitute a claim that it shall be perfected in him, but that its perfecting must be judged by a criticism addressed to determining real capacities, and not by the accidental standard of a given plurality. We shall pursue these ideas further in the following chapter.