I was reading just the other day in a recent number of Harper’s magazine about a fascinating new electronic device used for doing research in the back numbers of scientific periodicals. This is an appalling job at present; there are many thousands of papers published every year, there is a backlog of literally millions of them, and it is incredibly difficult to discover what has, in fact, been done in this jungle of material. Now a machine has been developed into which you can put magnetic tape to which the subject matter of the papers has been transferred, and in a very short time the machine will tell you where you can find out what you wish.
And we mustn’t forget our friends the Sputniks and satellites. These will be exceedingly useful, not so much in regard to outer space as in regard to the earth. They will give us extremely good information about weather. (I was appalled to read a statement from Dr Werner von Braun the other day saying that satellites will be sent up and a number of them connected together by radio into a kind of electric relay which will permit TV programmes to be globally transmitted at any moment. This is a grave menace, but there it is!)
In conclusion, it seems quite clear that enormous possibilities lie open to us, that we are on the threshold of profound discoveries within our own nature and in external nature. If we can solve the basic political and demographic problems, we could produce a world of the most incalculably superior nature. Whether we shall do so or not, I don’t know, but it is very important to realize that the immediate future is probably immensely important in regard to these possibilities. Harrison Brown has summed it up by saying that the next hundred years will undoubtedly prove to be more critical than any that mankind as a whole has been called upon to face. This is a very sobering prospect, but I think it is perfectly true.
More than fifty years ago Tolstoy said that in a society which is badly organized, as ours is, where a small minority rules over the majority, every scientific advance and conquest of nature strengthens the hand of the minority against the majority. It is up to us to decide now whether these conquests of nature and accessions of knowledge are to be used for frightful and inhuman ends, or whether they are to be used to create the kind of progress of which we have dreamed—and, indeed, the kind of progress of which nobody has ever dreamed, because the potentialities which are now opening up before us have never been present in the history of the world before.
The Individual Life of Man
In this lecture I shall discuss the relationship between man on the macroscopic level and man on the microscopic or individual level. What is the relationship between the individual and his society and the historical process in which both are involved? This seems a fairly obvious and trivial question, but I think it is actually a question of considerable importance; there is nothing self-evident about the relationship between the individual and the greater mass of historical and social life within which he is embedded.
I shall start with a physical analogy, not with a biological analogy, because the biological analogies so frequently used in discussing sociological matters are essentially false. I don’t think, for example, that society is an organism, as many people have said. An organism is a creature having its own life, able to direct itself, having sense organs and some sort of central nervous system; society does not seem to have any of these characteristics. We shall be much nearer the truth if we say that society is an organization within which individual organisms have their place.
The analogy I want to use is a very simple one: the analogy of gases and the individual molecules which compose them. The laws of gases deal with the interdependence of volume, pressure, and temperature. They are quite simple laws and extremely instructive and helpful in regard to our dealing with gases in any considerable quantity. The molecules of which gases are composed, however, possess neither temperature nor pressure, and almost no volume, so that the laws which apply to gases do not in the least apply to molecules. The only attributes of molecules which are relevant to the behaviour of gases are kinetic energy and the tendency to random movement. It is the combination of these two attributes which, when the molecules occur in sufficient numbers, leads to the characteristic behaviour of gases according to the formulations of the gas laws. The point that we have to stress is that gas laws are entirely different from molecule laws and that what holds true in one sphere has almost no relevance in the other.
In the same way we see that there is a profound difference between the generalizations which we can make about societies at large and the generalizations we can make about individuals. We cannot, by exercising empathy in relation to individuals, say anything about society; and conversely, we cannot, from the generalizations which we can infer from the observation of society, say anything about the behaviour of particular individuals. We see this very clearly in the statistics which are constantly being printed in the papers. We know that, according to the actuarial statistics of life insurance companies, the average age of death is sixty-seven for men and seventy-two for women. But this tells us nothing about when Mr or Mrs Jones is likely to die. There is then this gulf: the life of the individual, which is a life of self-consciousness, a life of feeling, a life of will, a life of urges and intentions, does not apply to society. The generalizations which can be made in the larger, social sphere are possible only because very large numbers and very considerable durations of time are involved.
In general we find that the greater the numbers involved in any natural event, the more precise are the generalizations—the so-called natural laws—which we can formulate. This was one of the great discoveries of the nineteenth century, which Ludwig Boltzmann made very clear in his classical work on heat. The same basic notion underlay the whole Darwinian theory, which was in fact the statement of the average behaviour of enormous numbers of individuals. Within societies the numbers of individuals are extremely small when compared with the numbers of molecules within a unit of gas or of atoms within a human body. Consequently, the generalizations which we can make from the observation of a society have many more exceptions than the laws of physics and chemistry (and they are not so precise and accurate).
Nevertheless we certainly can make some generalizations about society as a whole, and, although many sociologists have attempted to go much too far in formulating them, such laws have real value and are capable of giving us some power to predict the future. However, when we come to the behaviour of individuals, we find that a knowledge of these laws is not particularly helpful—it doesn’t help us to predict what Tom, Dick, and Harry are going to do. There is a basic differentiation between the natural sciences and the historical sciences. The natural sciences seek to reduce diversity to unity by finding the similarities between objects or events and by making a generalization about them, whereas in the study of history on the small scale, and in the study of biography, we remain concerned with particular cases. In the world of natural science it would almost be necessary to leave out of account a miracle, if it were to take place, because a miracle is something which can never be repeated and which occurs outside the general law of averages; but within the sphere of history, if a miracle took place we should certainly have to take account of it.
Let us now consider the relationship of the individual to history. Every individual life span obviously runs parallel to a sector of the general historical movement of the age in which the person lives. But to what extent do we exist in history? To what extent is an individual in the history of his time? To start with we must ask the question, What is history? Ideally, history is the record of everything that happens; clearly there could never be such a record because it is much too complex to set down and, anyhow, the changes and chances of the past have eliminated practically all information about earlier periods. In fact, what historians describe as history is simply those aspects of the past which, according to their own philosophy of life, they regard as particularly important and significant. Let me take an example from what a philosophical historian, Arnold Toynbee, says about the history of our time:
What will be singled out as the salient event of our time by future historians, centuries hence, looking back on the first half of the twentieth century and trying to see its activities and experiences in that just proportion which the time-perspective sometimes reveals? Not, I fancy, any of those sensational or tragic or catastrophic political and economic events which occupy the headlines of our newspapers and the foregrounds of our minds;
