Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/164

 I ?0 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOG 1

and spoon in our mouth at today's dinner ? Not our hand alone. >.>ine men have been raising wheat in Dakota, and potatoes in Michigan; others have been boiling salt in New York, others picking coffee in Java, and drying tea in Japan, and gathering spices in the isles of the sea ; and porters have carried on their backs, and loaded on drays, and sails have strained, and boilers have steamed, and officials have inspected, and merchants have sworn, and traders have broken bulk, and factory hands have labored all in the course of setting our table. If the family next door to some of us in the city should move away or die, nothing worth noticing might be subtracted from our life. If those thousands of people in distant parts of our own land or beyond seas should stop living and working, great sections of our own life would cease. This is merely a specification under the well-known and ill-known formula, "None of us liveth to himself." The monster known to theory as " the individual" does not exist except in theorists' speculations. The man who thinks himself an independent individual has put an optical illu- sion in place of himself. We human beings are what we are because we are parts of society. What society is decides what we are and what we may be.

Again, very few people have ever seen that a part of their life was lived a decade, a century, a millennium ago. Our life is not all today and tomorrow. Its yesterdays ( are just as really parts of it as any of its present moments. Society is like Tenny- son's brook, as of course the poet -meant for his lines to say. Society, too, goes on forever. Persons are bubbles on the surface of the brook, but each bubble is a part of the brook. Each bubble is what it is because of the bed which the brook has worn for ages ; because of the course of the brook from the source to the spot where the bubble forms ; because of the soil on the banks, the life in the stream, the sunshine or cloud in the sky. In plain prose, our lives, ourselves, are atoms of the life of humanity that has been working to form us through all the ages.

Suppose one of us at five years of age were thrown on Robinson Crusoe's island. Suppose the waif were naked, without