Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/765

 A THEORY OF SOCIAL MOTIVES 7$!

up through experience. The coarseness of the jests and amuse- ments of the lower classes is due to the long hours and intensity of their work which renders impossible that movement of the imagination through which one sympathetically understands one's associates.*®

Where work becomes mechanical, the expansive mood is not separate from, but moves alongside, the forceful mood. Agri- cultural laborers talk with each other or sing at their work. Biicker*^ suggests that rhythm originated in the accompanying of primitive labor with chanting. One of the chief reasons why young people reared in rural districts migrate to the city is that there, during the monotony of work, they enjoy the expansive cognition and feeling which comes from association with other workers. On the other hand, where work by reason of its intri- cacy or intensity does not become mechanical, the oscillatory movement is more pronounced. A person tending a fast-running machine or using a typewriter has no time for conversation. The work of lawyers and other professional men requires strict atten- tion. Furthermore the work of professional men is often too technical to repeat in conversation with friends at the close of the day and that of stenographers and machine-tenders is of too little interest to be talked about. For this reason one phase of the first level of expansive cognition, that is. the reminiscent movement of work-experiences, is becoming less and less im- portant among present-day workmen.

Turning now to an analysis of the second level of expansive cognition we note, first, that individuals remember states with

sions of nature ; and Darwin records in his own person the resulting weakness of the literary and emotional susceptibilities as a consequence of a too deeply ingrained and absorbing analytical habit of mind .... the contrast of tempera- ment that inclines one to this and the other to that form of pursuit and mode of its cultivation, lies largely along the same lines of division. We are all more or less impressionists ; we are all more or less scientific ; for, in all, the apportionment of dependence upon subconscious to that upon conscious pro- cesses acquires, as the character is molded and our habits become set, a definite value, which is our personal equation in this relation." — ^Jastrow, The Sub- conscious, pp. Ill, 112.
 * "The close geological observer tends to lose the general massive impres-

"Arbeit und Rhythmus.