Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/370

358 obedience to it as to his own true self. Such is the ethics which all institutional life enforces. Without institutional life there would be little or no leverage for ethical training. Sociology must expound, and pedagogy must recognize, institutional life as requiring the highest exercise of the ethical faculty of the individual. School management must recognize that the school virtues are exactly the social virtues. The integrity of the school and the society depend upon precisely the same unifying virtues which, named in the order of development, are politeness, truth, fullness, order, industry, justice and altruism, all of which return to the individual as personal virtues culminating in the virtue of virtues,—rational freedom. Pedagogy must consider the school as an institution based in the foregoing virtues, and which, properly managed, cultivates the same as private virtues in the individual. To all of which sociology gives the universal ground and explanation.

As a pedagogical discipline, apart from any direct connection, the study of sociology is of the greatest value. In grasping the marvelously complex whole of society into organic unity one has training in a most valuable pedagogical conception, namely, that the world which forms the individual's environment, while infinitely varied, is a closely integrated unity. If the primary conception of pedagogy is that of unity of the individual with his environment, the secondary conception is that of unity of the environment. The individual unifies himself with his environment by grasping that environment as diversity in unity. The heart of all method in education is that movement of mind which universalizes the individual object and individualizes the universe of objects. To such a mode of thought no study is a better discipline than that of sociology. In this study the student feels sure that there is unity; he cannot assume otherwise, but his whole stress of thought must constantly be put on finding the unity in the bewildering complexity of social phenomena.