Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/430

 4l6 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

the person has gradually developed out of the group in which he was originally wholly submerged. "There was never a time when, as we sometimes read, 'personality emerged'" (p. iii). This is to confuse a subordination to group organization with all lack of self- assertion, declares the author. Poverty is described as unfitness, but "in a social and not a biological sense" (p. 296). It is the well- to-do classes that are biologically unfit (p. 295). The idea of an average or commonplace mind — a "mean between the higher and lower intelligence making up the group" (p. 123) — seems to Pro- fessor Cooley fallacious. To suppose that any average opinion can be struck at a given time with regard to a question of current moment is, it is true, absurd. Leadership, prestige, and suggestion do not function in such fashion. But surely Professor Cooley does not mean to deny that every enduring group tends to produce a type of habit and sentiment which represents "mores" common to the broad medial zone of the society concerned. In this sense there are in every group typical, average persons reacting to stimuli in like and predictible ways. Professor Cooley combats the "dead- level" theory which DeTocqueville associated with democracy, and which modern communication, by the rapid diffusion of uniform suggestions, is supposed to create. There are said to be "two kinds of individuality, one of isolation and one of choice — modern condi- tions foster the latter while they efface the former" (p. 93). That is, provincialism is doomed while the. swift diffusion of countless ideas increases the chance of discovemg and developing special aptitudes and latent variations.

In his discussion of^classes Professor Cooley avoids on the one hand the blind complaisancy which denies their existence, and on the other the Marxian nightmare which pictures our society on the verge of a relentless class-conflict. Classes are distinguished from castes. It is the latter which might bring on revolution. So long as competition rather than inheritance determines social classifica- tion, our society is safe. Indeed, a measure of class spirit is a source of social efficiency. "The various functions of life require special influences and organization, and without some class spirit, some specialty in traditions and standards, nothing is well performed" (p. 209). The author sees as the chief protection against the menace of caste (a) the growth of a democratic spirit of service which pervades all classes and (&) the ambitions of young men who insist on opportunity to rise and resent a thwarting rigidity in the social