There are other societies besides those of men. Some are far more completely organized. The bees and the ants have carried social organization to a state of harmony and of adjustment to ends which is as strongly marked in its contrast with any that human societies present, as is the triumphant surgery of the solitary wasp by contrast with the blunders of an untrained man. In 'the civility of these little citizens' society is carried to a completeness corresponding with that of the life of the creatures who are its parts. In an ant-hill or a hive we have before us, some may say, a model of what a society should be. Perfect co-operation, complete subordination of individual to social ends, the highest possible working efficiency of each and all—it sounds well, and no one can deny that for bees and ants it works well. Would it work equally well for men?
The answer we give to this question will depend on two things. It will depend first on whether we think that men are or are not competent to advance, and are aided to advance, as beings not only spiritual in essential character and purpose, but self-creative and so able to reach both an efficiency beyond all constraint by institutions and machines, and an enlargement of community-life which shall embrace society upon society in all their diverse modes. Secondly, it will depend on whether we are or are not willing to organize any society by what used to be called biological methods, that is by the methods of the arena—of the 'gladiators' show.' If we decide on the gladiators' show and a social efficiency with no further outlook than a highly superior human ant-hill's, we pronounce ourselves believers that in principle the ant-hill manner of life with its isolation of society from society will work for men. We may be wrong even in a short view or a narrow view of man's capacities and existence; we are certainly wrong if spiritual progress lies before him as a glorious prospect not only for this man or society of men here, or another there, but for all men as members of an all-containing community made one only by an all-containing principle. In face of the promise and adventure of life we are as certainly wrong in giving consent to the ant-hill principle for society as we should be if we consented to exchange our own pregnant incompleteness for the perfection of the ant. Yet we of the modern civilized nations of Europe and America have been far too much influenced of late years, not only by our animal inheritance and the passions that we share with 'ape and tiger,' but by what is now a powerful tradition and in the last century was a new force—the mechanistic conception of social life. Our reasoning about society, our social science, even our social practices, have by this tradition been made not only more materialistic—many of us know that—but more plausibly mechanistic. It has seemed to us that we have science and nature both on our side, in trusting less to the initiative of life and more to its organization of circumscribed institutions and ordered means. We have taken a biological hypothesis far too seriously. And no doubt we have done this in great part because it has enabled us to leave uncriticized, or even to justify, habitual ways of acting and thinking which have about them still the taint of the pit from which we have been digged. These ways of ours were laid down for us in the long effort of each man to keep his footing on earth for himself and for the few he recognized as his own; but we have made them both more difficult and more dangerous by loading ourselves with a burden of perverted or artificial needs which not only call for perverted or artificial means to satisfy them, but set us in opposition to other men from whom we wrest their satisfaction. Those ways and this burden are proper to a creature who in very truth is seeking so to encumber life as to prevent its carrying him on, so to contract his own life as to prevent its intermingling with the lives of others. In short they are proper to one who is arresting life in himself as it has been arrested in the tiger or the ant. It will be arrested at a higher point—that is all; and it will be consciously arrested by the conscious building up of an obstacle far more serious than death. Therefore it is no mere failure; it is sin—sin against the true nature of human life.