Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/528

516 comes with division of labor and wider leisure to be integrated by aid of a communicating system, and to pass on from generation to generation forming a living, growing trunk of sciences and arts, the outgrowth of the labors of countless individuals through many centuries, associated life is able to do much more with the individual. By contact with a body of social knowledge his whole intellectual world is transformed; his ideas about the universe, about himself and about his relations to it and place in it are revolutionized; his comprehension of substances, properties and laws and his power to seize and turn to account the forces of nature is magnified. And with all this his activities are again changed and his efforts receive a new direction.

Yet he is not straightway made into the social man. The individual may help himself gladly from the fund of transmitted knowledge, he may rely upon the labors of specialists, he may bow to the dicta of recognized authorities, he may increase his rate of absorption by assuming relations to more people; but if with it all he relentlessly pursues his egoistic aims, availing himself of the socially collected and transmitted knowledge to gain his goal the sooner, he makes of society a mere convenience. The associated state has ground to a finer edge the intellect nature has given him, and taught him to handle it with fuller knowledge, but his heart and will are those of the solitary man. To a cluster of such individuals thus cleverly availing themselves of their joint wit and art in compassing their private and separate ends we should hardly give the name "society."

A deeper change is wrought in a man when his judgment as to the worth of things is modified by the wisdom born of association. Not only does light as to the properties and laws of things help him to gain his ends, but knowledge as to himself, his body and his mind, and as to the course of man's life often affects his choice of ends. His estimates as to the relative worth of food, drink, shelter, cleanliness, ornament, safety, repose, action, offspring or power change with greater contact with other lives and fuller intercourse with men. The opportunity to compare