Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/487

 PRESENT PROBLEMS OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 471

drawn afresh, for the city and country >f our day are not city and country as Aristophanes and Moliere knew them.

Occupation is perhaps the chief molder of classes. The famil- iar distinction of hunting, pastoral, agricultural, and industrial stages of social evolution does not become significant until it is recognized that each of these is not only a mode of production, but also a life. The business man and the farmer differ in their mental processes, and a full setting forth of this contrast would throw much light on revolutions in parties and policies. One of the greatest "finds" in recent sociology resulted from carefully comparing the leisure-class mind with the mind of the productive classes, and the traits developed by industrial employments with those called forth by pecuniary employments. Another nugget turned up by comparing the mentality that prevails in plastic social formations, such as rising cities, colonies, and frontier communities, with that of men in old and crystallized societies. The psychology of the pauper, the prostitute, and the criminal, belonging partly to anthropology, partly to sociology, have afforded a scientific basis for charity and penology.

The systematic survey of class types ought to be extremely helpful to general sociology. How can we definitively appraise slavery until we know what manner of man the master tends to become, what manner of man the slave? How can we estimate militancy without understanding the mental type created by the addiction to warlike pursuits? Ecclesiasticism and sacerdotalism cannot be judged as to their influence on society until we know the soul of the priest. The genesis of political liberalism is an enigma unless we comprehend the type of mind that forms in cities. Take a problem that now agitates the minds of sociolo- gists that of class-strife. What arrays class against class? " Interference of interests," says the Marxian ; " classes hate and fight each other because they are interested in incompatible social systems." But it is worth pondering if the strifes of classes are not often aggravated by the fact that the combatants differ in mental type and do not understand each other. The successful conciliation of labor disputes suggests that the feud between capi- tal and labor is partly owing to divergent modes of thought and