Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/381

 such that the selfsame content finds expression in many forms, and the same form in many contents. The events of history arrange themselves as if they were controlled by a tendency to make as much as possible of every given sum of movements. This is, apparently, the reason why history does not disintegrate into a collection of aphoristic movements, but binds together intimately, not only the synchronous, but the successive. That any particular form of life—social, literary, religious, personal—should survive its connection with a single content, and also lend itself unchanged to a new one; that the single content should maintain its essential nature through a mass of successive and mutually destructive forms, is precisely what the continuity of history will not permit. On the contrary, it prevents it, so that there should not be at some point an irrational leap, a break in the connection with the past. Since, now, the evolution of the race generally advances from the sensual and objective to the mental and subjective—only, it is true, frequently to reverse this order—there will often occur, in economic life, factors in the form of the abstract and intellectual, the forms which have built up the economic interests will intrude themselves into entirely different life-contents. But that is only one of the instances in which continuity and the law of parsimony are found in history. When, for example, the form of government exhibited in the state is repeated in the family; when the prevailing religion gives direction and inspiration to art; when frequent wars make the individual brutal and offensive even in peace; when political divisions influence non-political affairs and align diverging tendencies of culture according to party principles; then these are all expressions of this emphasized character of all historic life, of which the materialistic theory of history illuminates only a single side. And it is this side precisely which illustrates the development with which we are here concerned; forms of social relations either condense or refine themselves into a system of religious ideas, or add new elements to those which already exist; or, viewed differently, a specific emotional content which arose in the form of individual interaction, transfers itself in this relationship into a transcendent idea; this builds a new category