Civic consciousness

“ His sense of it, and the community's sense of it, is reinforced and augmented by the approval of the common consciousness, and by the feeling that a power, in harmony with the common consciousness and the community's desires, is working in him and through him. ”

“ When a political land-slide occurs on the occasion of a presidential election in the United States, the unity of will expresses the social mind. The emotional phase is temporary, public opinion changes more slowly; all the time the social mind is gaining experience and learning wisdom, as does the individual. Social consciousness, which at first is slight, increases gradually, until it fructifies in social purpose which results in achievement. History is full of illustrations of such development. ”

“ The other aims decreed in the fundamental law like the development of personal and collective discipline, civic conscience, vocational skill and social efficiency, should be subordinated to the cultivation of moral character as the handmaiden of an intransigent nationalism. ”

“ The success or failure of this effort to assure individual adjustment to the social norm and conformity to its practices varies with the prosilitizing enthusiasm of the society and with the ration of adaptability and self-consciousness of its individual members. ”

“ As soon as the place begins to spread at ease real responsibility of all sorts will begin, and the good-natured feeling must surely be that the civic conscience in her, at such a stage, will fall into step. ”

“ Liberate man's spirit from the dark, narrow, and oppressive, social dungeon. Full freedom of individuality and cultivation of the critical rational self constitute the essential conditions of a healthy social consciousness. The full development of a synthetic unity of the conscious in control of the subconscious in a pure atmosphere of liberty is sure immunity against all mental plagues, and is at the same time the source and aim of all true human progress. ”

“ They are for the most part silent forces that have been modifying the folk-ways in Europe and America. There has been little conception of social obligation or social ideals, little more than a blind obedience to the stimuli that pressed upon the individual and the group. But with the awakening of the social consciousness and a quickening of the social conscience has come telic progress. ”

“ That is to say, the free citizen who devotes himself to the public life of his community, sharing in the management of its affairs and winning personal honor and distinction, lives a life accompanied by reason. But the thinker, the man who devotes himself to scientific inquiry and philosophic speculation, works, so to speak, in reason, not simply by *. Even the activity of the citizen in his civic relations, in other words, retains some of the taint of practice, of external or merely instrumental doing. ”

“ The general or public phase of larger consciousness is what we call Democracy. I mean by this primarily the organized sway of public opinion. It works out also in a tendency to humanize the collective life, to make institutions express the higher impulses of human nature, instead of brutal or mechanical conditions. That which most inwardly distinguishes modern life from ancient or mediæval is the conscious power of the common people trying to effectuate their instincts. ”

“ Hence, after a Liberal and an Imperial generation, each happy in their respective visions of wealth and expanding greatness, the current renewal of civic interests naturally takes the form of an awakening survey of our actual environment. ”

“ As in the realm of science he has always been the personification of scientific conscience, so in the realm of civic duty he has always been the personification of civic conscience, not one of those optimists who always comfort themselves with the belief that everything, however bad, will come right without a struggle ”

“ Public spirit is the life of the community in the heart of the individual.—This recognition that we belong to society, and that society belongs to us, that its interests are our interests, that its wrongs are ours to redress, its rights are ours to maintain, its losses are ours to bear, its blessings are ours to enjoy, is public spirit. ”

“ The individual must read his inward state in the light of the social spiritual group,” ... and thus reaches a sort of spiritual democracy. On the whole, however, his appeal is to idealism as the supplanter of materialism; he claims thought as the prius of knowledge, and identifies consciousness with thought. ”

“ Can men govern themselves? The affirmative is civilization—the negative is barbarism. The whole trend of modern life—the sweep of modern progress—is towards individual freedom and individual responsibility. ”

“ Each social formation, through each of its material activities, exerts its influence upon the civic whole; and each of its ideas and ideals wins also its place and power. ”

“ A certain social sense is, therefore, the foundation upon which all concerted action rests; and this, permeating the character and winning conformity in the life, produces a social order which is at once the criterion of civilization and the source of its power. ”

“ The social state at any time existing, is the resultant of all the ambitions, self-interests, fears, reverences, indignations, sympathies, &c., of ancestral citizens and existing citizens. The ideas current in this social state must, on the average, lie congruous with the feelings of citizens, and therefore, on the average, with the social state these feelings have produced. ”

“ This domestic Spiritual Power, being principally moral, and confined to a private life, requires the support and guidance of an intellectual power exterior to it, the sphere of which will naturally be wider, extending also to public life. ”

“ The condition of its being so claimable is that its exercise should be contributory to some social good which the public conscience is capable of appreciating, not necessarily one which in the existing prevalence of private interests can obtain due acknowledgment, but still one of which men in their actions and language show themselves to be aware. ”

“ He never dreamed in all his dreaming that these would again grow up and destroy the beautiful fabric of his new Society, so bright and unspotted in his mind. Of course there would be a social conscience “which, being social, is common to every man.” ”

“ Public life, like private life, would be very dull and dry if it were not for this belief in the essential beauty of the human spirit and the belief that the human spirit should be translated into action and into ordinance. ”

“ What we call civilization,—passing from an inferior to a superior condition of existence,—is a mental and moral process. If mind is the capital,—the producing force of society,—what shall we say of the person or community that neglects its improvement? Certainly, all that we should say of the miser, and all that was said of the timid servant who buried his talent in the earth. If one mind is neglected, then we fail as a generation, a state, a nation, as members of the human family, to answer the highest purposes of existence. ”

“ Not until we can make "the man in the street" a conscious citizen, instead of a political automaton, shall we be able to enlist his sympathies with "Civics"; and without those sympathies the sociologist's "Civics" will, I fear, be but partial and inaccurate. ”

“ That is, we mean that acts so characterized correspond exactly to a self in a peculiar attitude, viz., one of adequate standardizing and adjustment, of equilibrium, in383 view of all relations. The concept signifies that in finding our way into a moral world into which we are born in the process of valuing and judging, we take along the imagery of social judgment in which through language and behavior the individual is constantly adjusting himself, not only to the social institutions, and group organization but far more subtly and unconsciously to the social consciousness and attitudes. ”

“ But we can ask all men—artists, poets, litterateurs, and scientists—to be citizens, and if they realize imaginatively the spiritual conception of the State, we may assume that this imaginative realization of the State will influence the labors of the mind, and what is done will, consciously or unconsciously, have reference to that collective being which must dominate society more and more, which will dominate it as a tyranny if we fail in our labors, or liberate and make more majestical the spirit of man if we imagine rightly. ”

“ And by reason I do not mean social syllogisms, of whose premises we are always uncertain, but conclusions half unconsciously formed in the mind as the result of human experience operating on human feeling—the practical wisdom which we call common sense. Human conduct, individual and aggregate, must be regulated and determined by the consensus of the judgment of the wisest made effective through its gradual acceptance as the judgment of the majority. ”

“ From history and philosophy and custom, we pass, therefore, to the force which in our day and generation is becoming the greatest of them all, the power of social justice which finds its outlet and expression in the method of sociology.... ”

“ Has man individual traits, physical and mental, sufficiently strong to stand the strain of a highly complex social order? It will depend upon the strength of his moral character, mental traits, and physical resistance, and whether justice among men shall prevail, manifested in humane and sound social action. Future progress will depend upon a clearness of vision, a unity of thought, the standardization of the objectives of social achievement, and, moreover, an elevation of human conduct. ”

“ It is, to illustrate, physical, mental, and spiritual, or more elaborately, it is athletic, industrial, political, intellectual, moral, æsthetic, and religious, and in its social life has developed institutions answering to these different phases of itself. It is, again, lawful and lawless, old and young, conservative and radical, sympathetic and selfish. But whatever the mode of analysis or division or dichotomy, the unity of experience embraces all the elements, aspects, or relations that are discovered. ”

“ Here, too, in this many-bodied and many-souled community, as well as in the individual man's life, function determines structure. But function has there become self-conscious and world-conscious, aware of the many bodies and the many souls, aware of their needs and dangers, aware of their giving and their gaining. Men have societies within the community such as on the whole their conscious desires and purposes, their attitude towards their fellows, their sense of responsibility and obligations, their aims and ideals, demand. We have indeed the societies we deserve. ”

“ But each of the maxims can be taken to the heart and conscience of the individual, to become a principle of each man’s own character and conduct, and then to reappear, retranslated into social action, according to the wisdom of the time or the wisdom of the man or the wisdom of the Church. ”

“ Social and political justice, then, advances by fits and starts, through ideas—children of the one great idea of Harmony—which are suggested now by one, now by another, section or phase of national life. ”

“ He brought to politics a horror of crime, a vivacity and sincerity of conscience, a humanity, a sensibility, which seem only suitable to a young man. He based human society on maxims of morality, insisted upon a high and pure tone of feeling in the conduct of public business, and seemed to have undertaken to raise and authorize the generosity of the human heart. ”

“ Individualist doctrines celebrate the ‘I’, collective movements the ‘we’. Devoid of the fullness of self-assertion or the positive connotations of friendship, community and political solidarity, ‘you’ can tend to get overlooked. ”

“ Those who have lived under a democracy, or a full civil, mental, and religious freedom like our own, well know the crudity, the perversity, the persistency, the conceits and idiosyncrasies into which individualism will run on civil, social, and political matters of private and public interest. ”

“ But the communal system recognized the social nature of man, his essential weakness in isolation, and his inability to satisfy his bodily wants by himself. Thus admitting the human need of fellowship and correction, it deemed that man's spiritual progress could be best advanced in a way of life which took account of these facts. ”

“ So far as they have such knowledge, and a will based upon it, so far is the moral organism self-conscious and self-willing.... Thus, on the one hand, we must recognise that the State lives; that there is a nation’s soul, self-conscious in its citizens; and that to each citizen this living soul assigns his field of accomplishment [12] .” On a later page of the same book we read—“All the institutions of a country, so far as they are effective, are not only products of thought and creations of mind: they are thought, and they are mind. ”

“ Yet my aim was a final simplicity. I have sought to show my growing realisation that the essential quality of all political and social effort is the development of a great race mind behind the interplay of individual lives. That is the collective human reality, the basis of morality, the purpose of devotion. To that our lives must be given, from that will come the perpetual fresh release and further ennoblement of individual lives.... ”

“ The manly consciousness of freedom which creates and finds expression in the constitution elevates the middle classes who form its chief support; while the direct or indirect contact with public [Pg 100] affairs develops the intelligence and strengthens the character of the citizen. ”