Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/389

 being and willing, of all the antitheses and differences especially of our subjective life-interests, we can without more ado put the social totality into its place; for it is from this totality that all those impulses flow which come to us as the results of shifting adaptations, all that multiplicity of relations in which we find ourselves, that development of the organs with which we apprehend the different and almost irreconcilable aspects of the universe. And yet the social group is sufficiently unified to be regarded as the real unifying focus of these divergent radiations. Furthermore, the divine authority of kings is merely an expression for the complete concentration of power in their hands; as soon as the social unification, the objectification of the whole as against a part, has reached a certain point, it is conceived of by the individual as a supra-mundane power. And then, whether he still directly conceives it as social, or whether it is already clothed with divinity, the problem arises how much he, as an individual, can and must do to fulfil his destiny, and how much that supra-mundane principle will assist him. The independence of the individual in relation to that power, from which he received his independence, and which conditions its aims and methods, is as much a question in this case as in the other. Thus Augustine places the individual in a historic development against which he is as impotent as he is against God. And the doctrine of synergism is found throughout the entire history of the church conditioned by her internal politics. Just as, according to the strict religious conception, the individual is merely a vessel of the grace or wrath of god, so, according to the socialistic conception, he is a vessel of the forces emanating from the universal; and both instances reproduce the same fundamental ethical problem about the nature and the rights of the individual, and in both forms the surrender of the one to the other opposite principle frequently offers the only satisfaction still possible when an individuality, thrown wholly upon its own resources, no longer has the power to maintain itself.

This arrangement of religious and ethical-social ideas is supported by the fact that God is conceived as the personification of those virtues which he himself demands from the people. He is