Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/866

 850 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

ness. The categories are not logically exclusive the fault of the things themselves !

By the first category, interdependence, I mean the universal fact that every act or event in a human life has been made possi- ble or necessary by other acts or events connected with other lives both past and present, and that it helps to make or mar the lives of others. Beginning with the family and extending to the compass of the race, society is a network of interdepend- ences. One of the discoveries which pupils should be aided to make, in their study of any time or nation or human process, should be that the particular men concerned exemplified the truth "No man liveth unto himself."

By the second category, order or cooperation, I mean the machine-like interplay of actors and actions in every minute social group as well as in large societies. The relation is so clear that Mother Goose reported it genially, yet it is so obscure that society is daily dissipating its resources because the relation is not understood. From the factory whistle that rouses the workmen at five o'clock, to the curfew bell at the close of day, the waking and the working and the resting of a town tell the truth of human welfare resting upon some form of established order. Wherever men have been associated, even in the most temporary society, the measure of stability in their relations has been pre- served by an institutional order, as real while it lasted as though it were defined by the iron decrees of Medes and Per- sians. A mode of temporary equilibrium is one of the forms in which human association must be thought, if thought truly whether in the society of Ivan the Terrible or of Grover the Inscrutable. When the learners read of any epoch of the past, one of the forms in which they must be helped to represent it, if it is to reveal truth to them, must be the reconstructed balance of influence and action in which the lives of that past time pre- served their motion.

The biographical method of teaching history frequently violates this canon. Instead of being made to appear as one of the workers among whom the labor of their generation is