Social organization; a study of the larger mind (1909)

Social Organization, a Study of the Larger Mind () [Charles Horton Cooley] on leondumoulin.nl *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Originally published in.
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Leni rated it it was ok Nov 03, Caterina Fava rated it liked it Apr 19, John rated it really liked it Jan 25, Rebeca marked it as to-read Jun 11, Jaye marked it as to-read Oct 04, Steve added it Oct 30, Frank Spencer marked it as to-read Mar 08, Gary added it Jan 17, F Cats marked it as to-read Dec 25, Noah Dunsmore marked it as to-read Mar 16, Irene added it Apr 12, Com marked it as to-read Aug 26, Rebecca added it Feb 17, A word is a vehicle, a boat floating down from the past, laden with the thought of men we never saw; and in com- ing to understand it we enter not only into the minds of our contemporaries, but into the general mind of humanity continuous through time.

The popular notion of learn- ing to speak is that the child first has the idea and then gets from others a sound to use in communicating it; but a closer study shows that this is hardly true even of the simplest ideas, and is nearly the reverse of truth as regards developed thought. In that the word usually goes before, leading and kindling the idea — we should not have the latter if we did not have the word first. Such words, for instance, as good, right, truth, love, home, justice, beauty, freedom; are powerful makers of what they stand for. As the traveller must pass over the ground in either case, so the mind must pass through experience, but if it has language it finds its ex- perience foreseen, mapped out and interpreted by all the wisdom of the past, so that it has not only its own experi- ence but that of the race — just as the modern traveller sees not only the original country but the cities and plan- tations of men.

The principle that applies to words applies also to all structures that are built of words, to literature and the manifold traditions that it conveys. As the lines of Dante are "foot-paths for the thought of Italy," so the successful efforts of the mind in every field are preserved in their symbols and become foot-paths by which other minds reach the same point. And this includes feeling as well as definite idea.

It is almost the most wonderful thing about language that by something intangible in its order and move- ment and in the selection and collocation of words, it can transmit the very soul of a man, making his page live when his definite ideas have ceased to have value. In this way one gets from Sir Thomas Browne, let us say, not his conceits and credulities, but his high and religious spirit, hovering, as it were, over the page. The achievement of speech is commonly and properly regarded as the distinctive trait of man, as the gate by which he emerged from his pre-human state.

It means that, like Helen Keller, he has learned that everything has, or may have, a name, and so has entered upon a life of conscious fellowship in thought. A wider and fuller unity of thought took place in every group where it appeared. Ideas regard- ing the chief interests of primitive life — hunting, warfare, marriage, feasting and the like — were defined, communi- cated and extended.

Public opinion no doubt began to arise within the tribe, and crystallized into current sayings which served as rules of thought and conduct; the festal chants, if they existed before, became articulate and his- torical. And when any thought of special value was achieved in the group, it did not perish, but was handed on by tradition and made the basis of new gains. In this way primitive wisdom and rule were perpetuated, en- larged and improved until, in connection with ceremonial and other symbols, they became such institutions, of gov- ernment, marriage, religion and property as are found in every savage tribe.

Nor must we forget that this state of things reacted upon the natural capacities of man, perhaps by the direct inheritance of acquired social habits and aptitudes, cer- tainly by the survival of those who, having these, were more fitted than others to thrive in a social life. In this way man, if he was human when speech began to be used, rapidly became more so, and went on accumulating a social heritage. So the study of speech reveals a truth which we may also reach in many other ways, namely, that the growth of the individual mind is not a separate growth, but rather a differentiation within the general mind.

The individual has no better ground for thinking of himself as separate from humanity than he has for think- ing of the self he is to-day as separate from the self he was yesterday; the continuity being no more certain in the one case than in the other. If it be said that he is separate because he feels separate, it may be answered that to the infant each moment is separate, and that we know our per- sonal life to be a whole only through the growth of thought and memory. In the same way the sense of a larger or social wholeness is perhaps merely a question of our growing into more vivid and intelligent consciousness of a unity which is already clear enough to reflective observa- tion.

It is the social function of writing, by giving ideas a lasting record, to make possible a more certain, continu- ous and diversified growth of the human mind. It does for the race very much what it does for the individual. When the student has a good thought he writes it down, so that it may be recalled at will and made the starting- point for a better thought in the same direction; and so mankind at large records and cherishes its insights.

Until writing is achieved the accumulation of ideas de- pends upon oral tradition, the capacity of which is meas- ured by the interest and memory of the people who trans- mit it. It must, therefore, confine itself chiefly to ideas and sentiments for which there is a somewhat general and constant demand, such as popular stories — like the Homeric legends — chants, proverbs, maxims and the like. There can hardly be, without writing, any science or any diversified literature.

These require a means by which important ideas can be passed on un- impaired to men distant in time and space from their authors. We may safely pronounce, with Gibbon, that "without some species of writing no people has ever pre- served the faithful annals of their history, ever made any considerable progress in the abstract sciences, or ever possessed, in any tolerable degree of perfection, the use- ful and agreeable arts of life.

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It is quite the same with religious systems. The his- torical religions are based upon Scriptures, the essential part of which is the recorded teaching of the founder and his immediate disciples, and without such a record Christianity, Buddhism or Mohammedanism could never have been more than a small and transient sect.

There may well have been men of religious genius among our illiterate forefathers, but it was impossible that they should found enduring systems. The whole structure and progress of modern life evi- dently rests upon the preservation, in writing, of the achievements of the antique mind, upon the records, especially, of Judea, Greece and Rome.

Writing made history possible, and the man of history with Ins complex institutions. It enabled a rapid and secure enlargement of that human nature which had previously been confined within small and unstable groups. If writing, by giving thought permanence, brought in the earlier civilization, printing, by giving it diffusion opened the doors of the modern world. Before its advent access to the records of the race was limited to a learned class, who thus held a kind of monopoly of the traditions upon which the social system rested.

Throughout the earlier Middle Ages, for example, the clergy, or that small portion of the clergy who were edu- cated, occupied this position in Europe, and their system was the one animate and wide-reaching mental organiza- tion of the period. For many centuries it was rare for a layman, of whatever rank, to know how to sign his name.

Through the Latin language, written and spoken, which would apparently have perished had it not been for the Church, the larger continuity and cooperation of the human mind was maintained. Those who could read it had a common literature and a vague sense of unity and brotherhood. Roman ideas were preserved, however imperfectly, and an ideal Rome lived in the Papacy and the Empire. Education, naturally, was controlled by the clergy, who were also intrusted with political corre- spondence and the framing of laws. Printing means democracy, because it brings knowledge within the reach of the common people; and knowledge, in the long run, is sure to make good its claim to power.

It brings to the individual whatever pan in the heritar i ideas he is fit to receive. The world of thought, and eventuallv the world of action, comes graduallv under the rule of a true aristoeracv of intelligence and character, in place of an artificial one created by exclusive opportunity.

Everywhere the spread of printing was followed by a general awakening due to the unsettling suggestions which it scattered abroad. Political and religious agita- tion, bv no means unknown before, was immenselv stimulated, and has continued unabated to the present time. Lea, speaking of the liberal agitations of the early six- teenth century, ''had been rendered possible by the in- vention of printing, which facilitated so enormously the diffusion of intelligence, which enabled public opinion to form and express itself, and which, by bri: While the mass of mankind about us is ever common- place, there is always, in our day, a more select society not far away for one who craves it, and a man like Abra- ham Lincoln, whose birth would have meant hopeless serfdom a few centuries ago, may get from half a dozen books aspirations which lead him out to authority and beneficence.

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While spoken language, along with the writing and printing by which it is preserved and disseminated, is the main current of communication, there are from the start many side channels. Thus among savage or barbarous peoples we every- where find, beside gesture language, the use of a multi- tude of other symbols, such as the red arrow for war, the pipe of peace, signal fires, notched sticks, knotted cords, totems, and, among nations more advanced in culture, coats-of-arms, flags and an infinite diversity of symbolic ritual.

There is, indeed, a world of signs outside of language, most of which, however, we may pass by, since its general nature is obvious enough. First, as mere picture or image writing, con- veying ideas that could also be conveyed though with a difference in words ; and, second, as the vehicle of peculiar phases of sentiment incommunicable in any other way.

These two were often, indeed usually, combined in the art of the past. In modern times the former, because of the diffusion of literacy, has become of secondary impor- tance. Of the picture-writing function the mosaics, in colors on a gold ground, that cover the inner walls of St. Mark's at Venice are a familiar instance.

Social organization; a study of the larger mind.

They set forth in somewhat rude figures, helped out by symbols, the whole system of Christian theology as it was then understood. They were thus an illuminated book of sacred learning through which the people entered into the religious tra- dition. The same tradition is illustrated in the sculpture of the cathedrals of Chartres and Rheims, together with much other matter — secular history, typified by figures of the kings of France; moral philosophy, with virtues and vices, rewards and punishments; and emblems of husbandry and handicraft.

One of the simplest and most fruitful examples of this is the depiction of human forms and faces which embody, as if by living presence, the nobler feelings and aspirations of the time. Such works, in painting or sculpture, re- main as symbols by the aid of which like sentiments grow up in the minds of whomsoever become familiar with them.

Sentiment is cumulative in human history in the same manner as thought, though less definitely and surely, and Christian feeling, as it grew and flourished in the Middle Ages, was fostered by painting as much, perhaps, as by the Scriptures. And so Greek sculpture, from the time of the humanists down through Winckelmann and Goethe to the present day, has been a channel by which Greek sentiment has flowed into modern life. This record of human feeling in expressive forms and faces, as in the madonnas and saints of Raphael, is called by some critics "illustration"; and they distinguish it from "decoration," which includes all those elements in a work of art which exist not to transmit something else but for their own more immediate value, such as beauty of color, form, composition and suggested movement.

This latter is communication also, appealing to vivid but other- wise inarticulate phases of human instinct. Each art can convey a unique kind of sentiment and has "its own peculiar and incommunicable sensuous charm, its own special mode of reaching the imagination. It needs no argument, I suppose, to show that these arts are no less essential to the growth of the human spirit than literature or government.

The changes that have taken place since the beginning of the nineteenth century are such as to constitute a new epoch in communication, and in the whole system of society. They deserve, therefore, careful consideration, not so much in their mechanical aspect, which is familiar to every one, as in their operation upon the larger mind.

If one were to analyze the mechanism of intercourse, he might, perhaps, distinguish four factors that mainly contribute to its efficiency, namely: Expressiveness, or the range of ideas and feelings it is competent to carry. Permanence of record, or the overcoming of time. Swiftness, or the overcoming of space. Diffusion, or access to all classes of men. For most purposes our speech is no better than in the age of Eliza- beth, if so good; but what facility we have gained in the application of it! The cheapening of printing, permitting an inundation of popular books, magazines and news- papers, has been supplemented by the rise of the modern postal system and the conquest of distance by railroads, telegraphs and telephones.

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And along with these ex- tensions of the spoken or written word have come new arts of reproduction, such as photography, photo-en- graving, phonography and the like — of greater social im- port than we realize — by which new kinds of impression from the visible or audible world may be fixed and dissem- inated. It is not too much to say that these changes are the basis, from a mechanical standpoint, of nearly everything that is characteristic in the psychology of modern life. In a general way they mean the expansion of human nature, that is to say, of its power to express itself in social wholes.

They make it possible for society to be organized more and more on the higher faculties of man, on intelligence and sympathy, rather than on authority, caste, and routine. They mean freedom, outlook, indefinite possibility. The public consciousness, instead of being confined as regards its more active phases to local groups, extends by even steps with that give-and-take of suggestions that the new intercourse makes possible, until wide nations, and finally the world itself, may be included in one lively mental whole.

Social con- tacts are extended in space and quickened in time, and in the same degree the mental unity they imply becomes wider and more alert. The individual is broadened by coming into relation with a larger and more various life, and he is kept stirred up, sometimes to excess, by the multitude of changing suggestions which this life brings to him.

From whatever point of view we study modern society to compare it with the past or to forecast the future, we ought to keep at least a subconsciousness of this radical change in mechanism, without allowing for which noth- ing else can be understood. In the United States, for instance, at the close of the eighteenth century, public consciousness of any active kind was confined to small localities. Travel was slow, uncomfortable and costly, and people undertaking a con- siderable journey often made their wills beforehand. The newspapers, appearing weekly in the larger towns, were entirely lacking in what we should call news; and the number of letters sent during a year in all the thirteen states was much less than that now handled by the New York office in a single day.

People are far more alive to-day to what is going on in China, if it happens to inter- est them, than they were then to events a hundred miles away. The isolation of even large towns from the rest of the world, and the consequent introversion of men's minds upon local concerns, was something we can hardly conceive.

It was an age of sects, intolerant from lack of acquaint- ance. Probably there is nothing in this new mechanism quite so pervasive and characteristic as the daily newspaper, which is as vehemently praised as it is abused, and in both cases with good reason. What a strange practice it is, when you think of it, that a man should sit down to his breakfast table and, instead of conversing with his wife, and children, hold before his face a sort of screen on which is inscribed a world-wide gossip! The essential function of the newspaper is, of course, to serve as a bulletin of important news and a medium for the interchange of ideas, through the printing of inter- views, letters, speeches and editorial comment.

In this way it is indispensable to the organization of the public mind. Anderson, The Country Town, , The sort of intercourse that people formerly carried on at cross-road stores or over the back fence, has now attained the dignity of print and an imposing system. That we absorb a flood of this does not necessarily mean that our minds are degenerate, but merely that we are gratifying an old appetite in a new way. Henry James speaks with a severity natural to literary sensibility of "the ubiquitous newspaper face, with its mere monstrosity and deformity of feature, and the vast open mouth, adjusted as to the chatter of Bedlam, that flings the flood-gates of vulgarity farther back [in America] than anywhere else on earth.

No doubt it seems worse for venturing to share with literature the use of the printed word. That the bulk of the contents of the newspaper is of the nature of gossip may be seen by noting three traits which together seem to make a fair definition of that word. It is copious, designed to occupy, without exerting, the mind. It consists mostly of personalities and appeals to superficial emotion. It is untrustworthy — except upon a few matters of moment which the public are likely to follow up and verify. These traits any one who is curious may substantiate by a study of his own morning journal.

There is a better and a worse side to this enlargement of gossip. It also tends powerfully, through the fear of publicity, to enforce a popular, somewhat vulgar, but sound and human standard of morality. On the other hand it fosters super- ficiality and commonplace in every sphere of thought and feeling, and is, of course, the antithesis of literature and of all high or fine spiritual achievement. It stands for diffusion as opposed to distinction. In politics communication makes possible public opin- ion, which, when organized, is democracy.

The whole growth of this, and of the popular education and en- lightenment that go with it, is immediately dependent upon the telegraph, the newspaper and the fast mail, for there can be no popular mind upon questions of the day, over wide areas, except as the people are promptly in- formed of such questions and are enabled to exchange views regarding them. Our government, under the Constitution, was not originally a democracy, and was not intended to be so by the men that framed it. It was expected to be a repre- sentative republic, the people choosing men of character and wisdom, who would proceed to the capital, inform themselves there upon current questions, and deliberate and decide regarding them.

That the people might think and act more directly was not foreseen. The Constitution is not democratic in spirit, and, as Mr. Political philosophy, from Plato to Montesquieu, had taught that free states must be small, and Frederick the Great is said to have ridiculed the idea of one extending from Maine to Georgia. It is necessary that the quickness of the prince's resolutions should supply the distance of the places they are sent to.

It is said by those who know China that while that country was at war with Japan the majority of the Chinese were unaware that a war was in progress. Such igno- rance makes the sway of public opinion impossible; and, conversely, it seems likely that no state, having a vigorous people, can long escape that sway except by repressing the interchange of thought.

When the people have in- formation and discussion they will have a will, and this must sooner or later get hold of the institutions of society. One is often impressed with the thought that there ought to be some wider name for the modern movement than democracy, some name which should more distinctly suggest the enlargement and quickening of the general mind, of which the formal rule of the people is only one among many manifestations.

Pppular education is an inseparable part of all this: And that further development of education, rapidly becoming a conscious aim of modern society, which strives to give to every person a special training in preparation for whatever function he may have aptitude for, is also a phase of the freer and more flexible organization of mental energy. The same enlargement runs through all life, including fashion and other trivial or fugitive kinds of intercourse.

And the widest phase of all, upon whose momentousness I need not dwell, is that rise of an international consciousness, in literature, in science and, finally, in politics, which holds out a trust- worthy promise of the indefinite enlargement of justice and amity. This unification of life by a freer course of thought is not only contemporaneous, overcoming space, but also historical, bringing the past into the present, and making every notable achievement of the race a possible factor in its current life — as when, by skilful reproduction the work of a mediseval painter is brought home to people dwelling five hundred years later on the other side of the globe.

Our time is one of "large discourse, looking before and after. Never, certainly, were great masses of men so rapidly rising to higher levels as now. Human nature desires the good, when it once perceives it, and in all that is easily understood and imitated great headway is making. Nor is there, as I shall try to show later, any good reason to think that the conditions are permanently unfavorable to the rise of special and select types of excellence. The same facility of communication which animates millions with the emulation of common models, also makes it easy for more discriminating minds to unite in small groups.

The general fact is that human nature is set free; in time it will no doubt justify its freedom. The enlargement affects not only thought but feeling, favoring the growth of a sense of common humanity, of moral unity, between nations, races and classes. Among members of a communicating whole feeling may not always be friendly, but it must be, in a sense, sympathetic, in- volving some consciousness of the other's point of view.

Even the animosities of modern nations are of a human and imaginative sort, not the blind animal hostility of a more primitive age. They are resentments, and resent- ment, as Charles Lamb says, is of the family of love. The relations between persons or communities that are without mutual understanding are necessarily on a low plane. A really human fellow-feeling was anciently confined within the tribe, men outside not being felt as members of a common whole. The alien was commonly treated as a more or less useful or dangerous animal — destroyed, despoiled or enslaved.

Even in these days we care little about people whose life is not brought home to us by some kind of sympathetic contact. We may read statistics of the miserable life of the Italians and Jews in New York and Chicago; of bad housing, sweatshops and tuberculosis; but we care little more about them than we do about the sufferers from the Black Death, unless their life is realized to us in some human way, either by personal contact, or by pictures and imag- inative description.

And we are getting this at the present time. The re- sources of modern communication are used in stimulating and gratifying our interest in every phase of human life. Russians, Japanese, Filipinos, fishermen, miners, mil- lionaires, criminals, tramps and opium-eaters are brought home to us. The press well understands that nothing human is alien to us if it is only made comprehensible. With a mind enlarged and suppled by such training, the man of to-day inclines to look for a common nature everywhere, and to demand that the whole world shall be brought under the sway of common principles of kindness and justice.

He wants to see international strife allayed — in such a way, however, as not to prevent the expansion of capable races and the survival of better types; he wishes the friction of classes reduced and each interest fairly treated — but without checking individuality and en- terprise. The work of communication in enlarging human nature is partly immediate, through facilitating contact, but even more it is indirect, through favoring the increase of in- telligence, the decline of mechanical and arbitrary forms of organization, and the rise of a more humane type of society.

History may be regarded as a record of the strug- gle of man to realize his aspirations through organization; and the new communication is an efficient tool for this purpose. Assuming that the human heart and conscience, restricted only by the difficulties of organization, is the arbiter of what institutions are to become, we may ex- pect the facility of intercourse to be the starting-point of an era of moral progress.

It is a question of utmost interest whether these changes do or do not contribute to the independence and pro- ductivity of the individual mind.

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Do they foster a self- reliant personality, capable at need of pursuing high and rare aims, or have they rather a levelling tendency, re- pressive of what is original and characteristic? There are in fact opposite opinions regarding this matter, in support of either of which numerous expressions by writers of some weight might be collected. From one point of view it would appear that the new communication ought to encourage individuality of all kinds; it makes it easier to get away from a given environ- ment and to find support in one more congenial.

The world has grown more various and at the same time more accessible, so that one having a natural bent should be the more able to find influences to nourish it. And so with any sect of religion, or politics, or art, or what not; if there are in the civilized world a few like-minded people it is comparatively easy for them to get together in spirit and encourage one another in their peculiarity. It is a simple and recognized principle of development that an enlarged life in the organism commonly involves greater differentiation in its parts. That the social en- largement of recent times has in general this character seems plain, and has been set forth in much detail by some writers, notably by Herbert Spencer.

Many, indeed, find the characteristic evil of the new era in an extreme individuality, a somewhat anarchic differentia- tion and working at cross purposes. Modern conditions, according to this, break down all limits to the spread of ideas and customs. Great populations are brought into one mental whole, through which movements of thought run by a contagion like that of the mob; and instead of the individuality which was fostered by former obstacles, we have a universal assimilation.

This uniformity in externals is held to be only the outward and visible sign of a corresponding level- ling of ideas. People, it is said, have a passion to be alike, which modern appliances enable them to gratify. Al- ready in the eighteenth century Dr. Johnson complained that "commerce has left the people no singularities," and in our day many hold with John Burroughs that, " Con- stant intercommunication, the friction of travel, of streets, of books, of newspapers, make us all alike; we are, as it were, all pebbles upon the same shore, washed by the same waves.

They tend to make life rational and free instead of local and accidental. They enlarge indefinitely the competition of ideas, and whatever has owed its persistence merely to lack of com- parison is likely to go, while that which is really congenial to the choosing mind will be all the more cherished and increased. Human nature is enfranchised, and works on a larger scale as regards both its conformities and its non-conformities.

Something of this may be seen in the contrast between town and country, the latter having more of the individu- ality of isolation, the former of choice. It tends to extremes.

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A man carries himself out to his logical conclusions; he becomes a concentrated essence of himself. Evidently this sort of local individuality, characteristic of an illiterate people living on their own corn, pork and neighborhood traditions, can hardly survive the new com- munication.

It must be said, however, that rural life has other con- ditions that foster individuality in a more wholesome way than mere isolation, and are a real advantage in the growth of character. Among these are control over the immediate environment, the habit of face-to-face struggle with nature, and comparative security of economic position. All these contribute to the self-reliance upon which the farming people justly pride themselves. In the city we find an individuality less picturesque but perhaps more functional. There is more facility for the formation of specialized groups, and so for the fostering of special capacities.

Notwithstanding the din of communication and trade, the cities are, for this reason, the chief seats of productive originality in art, science and letters. The Atlantic Monthly, April, The former produces many quaint species, like the kangaroos, which disappear when brought into contact with more capable types; but the continent by no means brings about uni- formity. It engenders, rather, a complex organism of related species and varieties, each of which is compara- tively perfect in its special way; and has become so through the very fact of a wider struggle for existence.

So, easy communication of ideas favors differentiation of a rational and functional sort, as distinguished from the random variations fostered by isolation. And it must be remembered that any sort is rational and functional that really commends itself to the human spirit. Even revolt from an ascendant type is easier now than formerly, because the rebel can fortify himself with the triumphant records of the non-conformers of the past.

It is, then, probable that local peculiarity of speech and manner, and other curious and involuntary sorts of indi- viduality, will diminish. And certainly a great deal is thus lost in the way of local color and atmosphere, of the racy flavor of isolated personalities and unconscious pictu- resqueness of social types. The diversities of dress, language and culture, which were developed in Europe during the Middle Ages, when each little barony was the channel of peculiar traditions, can hardly reappear.

Nor can we expect, in modern cities, the sort of architectural individuality we find in those of Italy, built when each village was a distinct political and social unit. Since uniformity is cheap and convenient, we may expect it in all matters wherein men do not specially care to as- sert themselves.

We have it in dress and domestic archi- tecture, for instance, just so far as we are willing to take these things ready-made; but when we begin to put our- selves into them we produce something distinctive. Even languages and national characteristics, if the peo- ple really care about them, can be, and in fact are, pre- served in spite of political absorption and the assimilating power of communication.

There is nothing more notable in recent history than the persistence of nationality, even when, as in Poland, it has lost its political expression; and, as to languages, it is said that many, such as Roumanian, Bulgarian, Servian, Finnish, Norsk and Flemish, have revived and come into literary and popular use during the nineteenth century.

And, as regards the actual tendency of modern life, only an obstinate a priori reasoner will maintain with any con- fidence the decline of individuality. Those who charge that we possess it in extravagant excess have at least an equal show of reason. Nor, from the standpoint of sentiment, does the mod- ern expansion of feeling and larger sense of unity tend necessarily to a loss of individuality. There is no pros- pect that self-feeling and ambition will be "lost in love's great unity.

In a truly organic life the individual is self-conscious and devoted to his own work, but feels himself and that work as part of a large and joyous whole. He is self- assertive, just because he is conscious of being a thread in the great web of events, of serving effectually as a member of a family, a state, of humanity, and of what- ever greater whole his faith may picture.

If we have not yet an organic society in this sense, we have at least the mechanical conditions that must underly it. Sill's poem, Dare You? The action of the new communication is essentially stimulating, and so may, in some of its phases, be injurious. It costs the individual more in the way of mental function to take a normal part in the new order of things than it did in the old.

Not only is his outlook broader, so that he is incited to think and feel about a wider range of mat- ters, but he is required to be a more thorough-going specialist in the mastery of his particular function; both extension and intension have grown. General culture and technical training are alike more exigent than they used to be, and their demands visibly increase from year to year, not only in the schools but in life at large.

The man who does not meet them falls behind the procession, and becomes in some sense a failure: Fortunately, from this point of view, our mental func- tions are as a rule rather sluggish, so that the spur of modern intercourse is for the most part wholesome, awak- ening the mind, abating sensuality, and giving men idea and purpose. There is a rather general agreement among observers that, outside of his specialty, the man of our somewhat hurried civilization is apt to have an impatient, touch-and-y go habit of mind as regards both thought and feeling.

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