Note 277 — Chapter VI · PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM

Among the many other good things in Mr. Marett’s admirable Anthropology (one of the freshest works upon the subject, suggestive of the need, evidently felt in Oxford as well as elsewhere, of studying philosophy and letters, and nearly everything else in the mental and moral sciences, from the point of view of social anthropology) are the clearness and the relevancy of illustration in his insistence upon the importance of the “social factor” over all our thoughts of ourselves as agents and students in the universe of things.” Payne shows us (p. 146) “reason for believing that the collective ‘we’ precedes ‘I’ in the order of linguistic evolution. To begin with, in America and elsewhere, ‘we’ may be inclusive and mean ‘all of us,’ or selective, meaning ‘some of us only.’ Hence a missionary must be very careful, and if he is preaching, must use the inclusive ‘we’ in saying ‘we have sinned,’ whereas, in praying, he must use the selective ‘we,’ or God would be included in the list of sinners. Similarly ‘I’ has a collective form amongst some American languages; and this is ordinarily employed, whereas the corresponding selective form is used only in special cases. Thus, if the question be ‘Who will help?’ the Apache will reply, ‘I-amongst-others,’ ‘I-for-one’; but if he were recounting his personal exploits, he says sheedah, ‘I-by-myself,’ to show they were wholly his own. Here we seem to have group-consciousness holding its own against individual self-consciousness, as being for primitive folk on the whole the more normal attitude of mind.” It is indeed to be hoped that, in the future, philosophy, by discarding its abstractionism and its (closely allied) solipsism, will do its share in making this “group consciousness,” this consciousness of our being indeed “fellow-workers” with all men, once again a property of our minds and our thoughts.