Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/14

 2 The ranchman in Montana who has safely wintered his herd but cannot ship them to a market because a manufacturer in Illinois has failed to preserve an understanding with coal heavers and machinists and carpenters; the miner in Nevada who ferrets out a coincidence between certain acts of legislation and the decline of his silver in value; the rolling-mill operative in Pennsylvania who discovers that a body of men in Washington may vote an increase or decrease of his work and wages—all these and the rest represented by them learn to disregard the fixed factors in human relations, and instead to watch other players in the game of life as exclusively as opponents at the chessboard or rival teams on gridiron or diamond.

Through influences such as these it comes about that the fact of human association becomes a most intimate reality to the great masses of men long before philosophers have begun to learn its import.

II. The distinguishing mental trait of our age is undisciplined social self-consciousness. Men are more definitely and variously aware of each other than ever before. They are also more promiscuously perplexed by each other’s presence. We sometimes credit our generation with perceiving that we are members one of another, but the content of popular consciousness is more precisely rendered in the version, “meddlers one with another.” We know just enough about social contacts to regard man as the animal that makes the most trouble for its own species. Whatever be men’s aims or acts it seems impossible for them to venture upon an enterprise so rare that collision can be avoided with the anticipating prejudice, property, or purpose of other men. The fate that goes with us or against us into our battle no longer seems to be a power of nature, or a superhuman champion, but merely detached or confederate human volition. Whatever modern men’s theory of the social bond, no men have ever had more conclusive evidence that the bond exists.

III. This inevitable contact of man with men has produced confident popular philosophies of human association. Social self-consciousness formulates itself as guiding assumption or as controlling