Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/578

566 over into alliance with man. This make-weight mind once decreed man's temporal damnation, under the theory that this mortal life is for the subjugation and repression and crucifixion of man. Mind now begins to declare that this mortal life is man's opportunity to possess and expand and enjoy. The irrepressible wants of this newly self-asserting sovereign man make a new order of facts, which scholarship may not despise. Laws of moral motion begin to discover themselves in man's movements, as positively as the laws of physical motion in their sphere. Laws of moral affinity begin to suggest psychical uniformities as regular as the action of chemical affinity. The ultimate social fact—man—is a fact whose many phases and many potencies already enter with new powers into the social equation. Man always wanted life and liberty and happiness, but never did these wants mean so many things to any man as they do to some men today. Never did the mass of men bring within the sweep of their wants so large a fraction of that which complete man will demand and obtain.

The things which to our view make life and liberty and happiness are more and larger than to any previous men. Our bodies today are covetous of more and more complex satisfactions than physical man ever claimed before. Men's minds once yearned for the one sedative of authority, they now thirst for the thousand stimulants of criticism. Men's social wants seemed, a century ago, to be potentially assured, with the conquest of political freedom. Social man today finds political freedom, without industrial security, a delusion, a fraud, and an insult.

The latest phase of man is thus a new order of fact. Scholarship cannot contemplate these facts without finding itself face to face with the tardily unsealed order of nature—"Be thou a forceful part of that continuous cosmic enterprise which forever unmakes the things of today to recreate them in the things of tomorrow!"

Man, tugging to master the contents of newly surcharged consciousness, is the supreme fact which today's scholarship encounters. We cannot deal with this fact without "forgetting