Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/531

 SOCIAL CONTROL 517

Statesmen ground their appeals on it. The law absorbs it, and lawyers and judges speak the language of it. Patriotic and civic feeling is challenged in its name. The poet hurriedly masks its stern outlines with myths, fancies, and allusions. The artist finds radiant and beautiful symbols for it. The tendency writer feeds upon it. In every college "moral philosophy" is taught; it underlies the most solemn appeals to rising manhood. Simpli- fied, popularized, and stereotyped, it settles ever deeper into our education, till even the tenderest ages are prepossessed by it. Thus become conventional, official, and orthodox, moral philos- ophy has come to be in this century one of the two great secular instruments of control. The charm of a type, the authority of the inner law these seem to be the master forces in the fore- most societies and in the upper levels everywhere. " Rise to this ideal," and "Respect the dictates of conscience" these injunctions disguised in a hundred ways are the pith of those appeals that smack most of the modern and democratic.

Obvious enough are the advantages of a system of ideas that controls by seeming to grant moral autonomy, that with lofty gesture refers the individual to the voice of his inmost self, after having carefully primed the monitor in advance. It will be bet- ter to dwell on the unsuspected weaknesses that forbid us to look upon it as a stand-by and a sheet-anchor of social order.

The ludicrous contrast between the ponderous court-of-law procedure of the moral philosopher and the simple directness of good people in the workaday world is significant. It means that he has made the fonn of choice at the margin of sociality the type of all moral choosing. This has given opportunity for many a novel, play, and satire, to drive home the contrast between conscien- tiousness and whole-souled goodness.

In lieu of an external code the staking of everything on con- science is liable to end in a badness the more complete because wearing that badge of goodness, " inward self-approval." The inward tables of the law are not easy to write from the outside. Morality, therefore, is liable to degenerate into a self-approba- tion of the hollow conscience, for which acts are good simply