Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/595

 a thing which has merely a nominal existence would be really nothing but a mass of such imaginary matter, absolutely at one’s disposal, offering no resistance, being stuff in itself, that is to say, potentially anything one may be able to make, to knead, to shape, or to construe out of it (of course, real matter may and will more or less approach to this idea). On the other hand, to think of an ideal thing as being ideal is not the same as to think of it as imaginary matter; but if one aims at a certain object, if one follows out one’s designs, one is constrained by a psychological necessity to break resistances and to subject things as well as wills to one’s own will; one tends to make them all alike, as “wax in one’s hand,” to remove or to oppress their own qualities and their own wills, so as to leave, as far as possible, nothing but a dead and unqualified heap of atoms, a something of which imaginary matter is the prototype. Of course, it is only as a tendency that this dissolving and revolutionary principle is always active, but its activity is manifest everywhere in social life, especially in modern society, and characterizes a considerable portion of the relations of individuals to each other and consequently to their corporations. As long as men think and regard “society”—that is to say, their clan or their polis, their church or their commonwealth—as real and as truly existing; nay, when they even think of it as being alive, as a mystical body, a supernatural person—so long will they not feel themselves as its masters; they will not be likely to attempt using it as a mere tool, as a machine for promoting their own interests; they will look upon it rather with awe and humility than with a sense of their own interest and superiority. And, in consequence of feelings of this kind, they even forget their own authorship—which, as a rule, will indeed be an ideal one only; they will feel and think themselves, not creators, but creatures of their own corporations. This is the same process as that which shows itself in the development of men’s regular behavior toward their gods, and the feeling and thinking just mentioned are always closely related to, or even essentially identical with, religious feeling and thinking. Like the gods themselves, to whom so regularly la cité antique, with its temples and sanctuaries, is dedicated, the city or