Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/566

 552 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Omer's Arabs, of Garibaldi's Italy, Kossuth's Hungary or New Japan. A Society of Jesus or a Civic League has a goal toward which it presses. But an ideal that guides the lives of many members of a society is not therewith a social ideal. As in an army there are held up standards of obedience, endurance, and bravery, which become ideals for its members, but which for the army as a whole are mere means to an end and not at all to be identified with its ideals of achievement, so society gives its members ideals which are in no wise ideals for society as a whole. Let us therefore not fail to distinguish "type" from "ideal." Society gets up certain patterns, which as they are framed in the interest of the group, may be termed "social types." In a differentiated society, there are many of them and they are unlike. These if persistently held up may become in the course of time ideals each for the class for which it is intended. By making distinct these stages in the process we are enabled to see that the presence of self-control, fidelity, and devotion in the types held up for imitation in a community by no means evidences these qualities in the character of the group that frames these types. A social type may be lofty because the character of society is high, or simply because the mechanism of control is perfect. It is, indeed, perfectly possible for the pattern conduct of a community of grasping men to embrace fair play and respect

a, for ownership. It is just because the types contrived and set up are higher than the actual feelings and standards of society that they can achieve a moral uplift.

It will here be objected that such a differentiation of social type from private standard will do no good. The trick is too thin, the legerdemain too transparent. By no such device can the stream be made to rise higher than its source. Either the

' social type agreed upon imposes on nobody and is hence inef- fective, or it imposes on the framers of it and is therefore a social ideal.

We escape this paradox by recognizing three great social facts the functional differentiation of society, the division into leaders and led, and the sway of the past over the present. To