Social Theory and Christian Thought (RLE Social Theory) by Werner Stark

Author:Werner Stark [Stark, Werner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317651093
Google: ZYM9BAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-08-07T02:43:51+00:00

IV

In the foregoing exposition of Newman’s social philosophy, his view on the relation between individual and community is already clearly discernible. If ideas are social entities, men cannot be more than serving members of a sovereign whole. If authority has the function of safeguarding the health and existence of the social bodies in which the real life of humanity resides, those under it cannot but be bound to pay obedience to its commands. But, even so, the relationship in question has two terms, and can be looked upon from two sides. So far it has been seen through the eyes of the collective unit: it must now be surveyed from the point of view of the individual sub-unit which, after all, is the most tangible reality.

That the individual has a life, a will, and a drift of his own, Newman knew very well, and did not underestimate the strength of the impulse by which he is dominated and urged onward. “No one,” he says, “has power over the issues of his principles; we cannot manage our argument, and have as much of it as we please and no more.”3

If man were nothing but a reasoning animal, if he moved from one idea to the other as the mathematician proceeds from equation to equation, by way of hard and fast rules, a conflict between individual and community could not arise. But he is not a reasoning animal. He is a spirit endowed with a creative power which leads him to conceptions and convictions which no ratiocination could ever reach. “The question indeed may be asked whether a development can be other in any case than a logical operation; but, if by this is meant a conscious reasoning from premises to conclusion, of course the answer must be in the negative. An idea under one or other of its aspects grows in the mind by remaining there; it becomes familiar and distinct, and is viewed in its relations; it leads to other aspects, and these again to others, subtle, recondite, original, according to the character, intellectual and moral, of the recipient; and thus a body of thought is gradually formed without his recognizing what is going on within him. And all this while, or at least from time to time, external circumstances elicit into formal statement the thoughts which are coming into being in the depths of his mind; and soon he has to begin to defend them; and then again a further process must take place, of analysing his statements and ascertaining their dependence one on another. And thus he is led to regard as consequences, and to trace to principles, what hitherto he has discerned by a moral perception, and adopted on sympathy; and logic is brought in to arrange and inculcate what no science was employed in gaining. …. The spontaneous process which goes on within the mind itself is higher and choicer than that which is logical; for the latter, being scientific, is common property, and can be

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