Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/725

 NOTES AND ABSTRACTS 709

work is also encouraged. As a rule, every villager is to make two pairs of straw sandals every night before he goes to bed. Since the outbreak of the present war, the number has been increased to three pairs instead of two. After ten years, the result of this co-operative work will amount to a profit of 40,000 yen. A part of this money has already been contributed toward the war fund. And, moreover, to make the independence and self-government of the village firm and secure, the villagers are zealously striving to lay up a village fund. The profit from this source does not amount to much at present, and yet it is hoped that the time will not be very far distant when all the ordinary expenses of the village will be defrayed from the interest of this village fund alone. A statement prepared in the Japanese Home Office; The Japan Times, December 24, 1904.

The Social Life. All men working at their various tasks continually lend one another help and co-operation without suspecting oftentimes that they are in association. This intricate and spontaneous co-operation we speak of as the social life. But it is not a single group to which all the activities of any man are related ; in his pleasure, in his education, in his business, in his religion, he is participating in the life of many groups. In each of these there are systems of ideas which gradually occupy and dominate the mind. But these ideas are not always at peace ; inner conflicts and contradictions occur, and the resulting con- duct on the part of the individual is a most bewildering complex product. Hence the difficulty of social science.

While social life, viewed in the large, seems extremely varied, yet, due to the social law of division of labor, continual repetition rules in the life of the indi- vidual. Indeed, social life is distinguished by an intimate union of component elements, each concerned with a unique work, yet all profiting through a reci- procity of exchange of the products of each. Society thus viewed in its aspects of interdependence may be described correctly as an organism, but it is important to add, an organism of ideas.

But it is not sufficient to perceive the repetitious round of actions by which individuals co-operate unconsciously in the life of society, as an organ concurs in the general life of the body of which it is a part. It is necessary that there should be something common to all minds, and to all wills, and which should serve as a point of junction. It is true that we yield more or less blindly to certain great currents of opinion, or habits of thought common to society ; but individual works powerfully upon individual as an agent of suggestion, a model for imita- tion as well. This factor of individuality is not to be slighted : Why is it that one suggestion is rejected and another followed, one social current of ideas accepted, and another made the object of at least inner protest? Here and there new ideas, revolutions of opinion, present themselves : these must be accounted for. In a similar way it is important to remember that identical thoughts, as a matter of fact, do not exist in two consciousnesses ; every mind has its own peculiar fashion of understanding, it may be a scientific formula, or, much more frequently, an affirmation bearing upon practical affairs.

We have already seen the co-ordinative unity of society. This unity can be nothing else than a unity of ends of which different individuals performing differ- ent tasks may have a common consciousness. The better these ends are perceived, and the better it is understood that other individuals have assigned themselves the same objects of effort, the greater will be the social co-ordination effected. Social life implies, then, a multiplicity of individual existences, and a unity of directions imparted to these existences, because all the individuals recognize in themselves a common tendency, a common desire for the realization of a common end. It is interesting to trace the transformations that occur in the ruling ends of nations or lesser social groups, and especially the judgment of the value of individual tasks according to the standard of the prevailing social end. Thus a period of great wars exalt the military type of hero, while the predominance of industrial ends serves to enhance the value set upon the work of the director of industry.

As we see it today, social life is above all a national life ; it is true at the same time that international relations are multiplying on every hand, and are increasing in intensity and variety in the life of each nation. But while the social