Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/258

 242 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

but the arguments which have brought us where we are, and which would make us read both the past and the present in our own way, seem unassailable. Whether we have been thinking of inquiry or of the answer to inquiry, or of any other incident in experience, we have been dealing with something that may be said to be superior to the distinction between what is personal and what is social. There can be no personal experience with- out its large-written expression in society. There can be no social divisions or distinctions that are not within every individual person. In short, for all the incidents of human experience the personal and the social are so intimate with each other that, though the distinguishing characters which determine social classes may make professions, they cannot make, and should not be interpreted as making, such wholes of experience as belong to personality. Society, the social environment, is only the writing on the wall of personal life. The social professions conserva- tism and radicalism, rigorism and hedonism among the rest only show society as a whole dividing the labor of maintaining socially the same unity of human experience that belongs to the life of every individual person.

This distinction between the profession, as the basis of class distinctions in society, and the unity of experience as to be found only in either society as a whole or the personal individual, is a very important one. 3 It suggests what the real function of society may be. Thus the professions of the many social classes, by the specialism which their division of the labor of experience makes possible, are of incalculable value to the individual. I have called society the writing on the wall. It is also, through the specialism of its different professional classes, the individual as seen under a microscope, each phase of his life being professionally sepa- rated from the rest, and exaggerated or magnified for public scrutiny many diameters. Every individual, too, is bound to have his professional associations, so that he is sure in some

Materialism," American Historical Review, July, 1905, and "The Personal and the Factional in Social Life," Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Method, July 6, 1905. These articles were written some months later than this present one, which the accidents of publication have delayed.
 * For other discussions of this distinction see two articles, " History and