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Thus oases of prayer and clear thinking might be created in our social wilderness, gradually developing such power and group-consciousness as we see in really living religious bodies. The group would probably make some definite piece of social work, or some definite question, specially its own.
Those whose chief gift was for action would thus be directly supported by those natural contemplatives who might, if they remained in solitude, find it difficult to make their special gift serve their fellows as it must. Group-consciousness would cause the spreading and equalization of that spiritual sensitiveness which is, as a matter of fact, very unequally distributed amongst men.
If they did harmonise if everybody's did then, by these individual adjustments the complete group-consciousness of humanity would be changed, brought back into conformity with the Transcendent; and the spiritual world would be actualised within the temporal order at last.
Patriotism we thought to be, in the third place, devotion to the group. Here the problem of the teaching of patriotism becomes specifically a question of social education. The question arises as to precisely what the objects of the devotion we call loyalty to the group are, and what factors in group-consciousness need most to be emphasized or educated as patriotism.
In either case, the aim is the production of a special group-consciousness; the reinforcing of languid or undeveloped individual feeling and aptitude by the suggestion of the crowd. This, and its result, is seen of course in its crudest form in revivalism: and on higher levels, in such elaborate dramatic ceremonies as those which are a feature of the Catholic celebrations of Holy Week.
The sense of unity which is so inseparable from the cosmic conscious state, was always uppermost in Emerson's mind. Neither did he ever present as unity that state of consciousness that may be termed organization-consciousness group-consciousness it is often called.
As the evolutionary point of view forced its way into recognition, scholars became aware of the real nature of myth and legend; they realized that beliefs of this sort are products of a creative group-consciousness saturated with a view of the world which we have slowly outgrown; they sensed the mental complexity of the past and became suspicious of the naïve assumption that religions were formed in a generation by the sheer authority of a single man or of a small group of men.
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. Another illustration of the sociality engrained in primitive speech is to be found in the terms employed to denote relationship. "My-mother," to the child of nature, is something more than an ordinary mother like yours.
We can now consider these points in greater detail: and first that of the religious group-consciousness which a church should give its members. This is of a special kind. It is axiomatic that group-organization of some sort is a necessity of human life.
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