Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/255

 SOCIAL CONTROL 241

rich and varied we can distinguish a development of man's feel- ings, judgments, and choices which may be termed the evolution of personality. The law of it is that men come to feel toward more things and to feel toward them more strongly. The world's gray is broken up into lights and shadows. For instance, during a definite period we can see the Greek race pass from indifference to the strongest feelings of admiration or dislike for a work of art. During the Middle Ages we can observe the dawn of that sense of the charm of woman that was to give birth to romantic love. With the Renaissance the feeling for natural beauty develops prodigiously, while in about a century and a half we have seen the rise of a passion for absolute self-direction. Now in the midst of these developments we can discover a growing seme of the charm of persons.

So far as this means keener feelings about personal beauty or ugliness it is a chapter in the development of taste. But there is something more than aesthetic in the growing emphasis of attitude toward traits of character. In the fourth century before Christ men are enamored of courage, justice, magnanimity. In the fourth century after, it is mercy, meekness, unselfishness, that are prized. With the rise of chivalry, courage, courtesy, and purity become supreme values. In fact, whenever a people is formed certain character values are sure to be throned among the gods and become the goal of individual endeavor. The possessor of these is not followed simply as a promiser of suc- cess ; he is adored as a hero.

Besides this development of personality there is a certain social development that favors hero worship. The military organization of an invading host, coupled with the stratification of races through conquest, ranges men, as it were, on social ter- races. Those kingly men who stand high up on the social pyra- mid are invested with an additional prestige by their excep- tional birth, wealth, education, or privilege. The hearty rec- ognition of their superiority, and the frank acknowledgment of inferiority by common men, smooths the way to a costless

ndency of the born leaders from the higher class, and thus