Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/567

NOTES AND ABSTRACTS 553 may bring conflict, but it is by no means necessary that they should. Their common duties are such as they owe to the public in an honest product. Their mutual duties are such as they owe to each other.

Industrial conciliation has two main features: (i) Its recognition that the two sides have an equal right to a voice in the decision of all questions of common interest; and (2) the permanent character of the machinery employed. Industrial conciliation follows naturally from a fulfillment of their mutual duties. —, The Church Social Union, June, 1897.

Our Social and Ethical Solidarity. — "When at present society is declared to be an organism, it is not meant that the individuals composing it have consciously organized it; nor merely that they are by nature destined to live in social communion. It is meant that we human beings by force of our ingrained constitution form of necessity part of an integral social structure in essentially the same manner as the sundry organs of a living being, or its sundry structural units, form part of an integral vital structure." . . ..

"Human beings form constituent units of society, not merely by force of the interdependence of their divers external functions, but also, and more radically still, by force of their mental interdependence. It is, in fact, exclusively through such mental interdependence, through such innate dependence of humanly organized minds upon one another for their very existence as such, and for the possible efficiency of their function; it is through this mutual dependency of their minds upon one another that men are social and ethical beings. Without it man would be a soulless, thoughtless, irresponsible animal, and human society and its ethical bearings non-existent." . . ..

The analogy between society and the vital organism holds good "not as between the organic interdependence of the constituent units of society and that of the constituent elements of the organism, but between the gradual development of social life and the phyletic development of living beings in relation to their environment. The so-called growth of society can, therefore, not rightly be compared to the growth of an individual organism, but only to the development of vital organization in the course of phyletic evolution."

Our inner life, consciously manifest as emotion, thought, and volition, is complemental to relations originally established between ourselves and the outside world. "Of such inner-life relations, those binding us to our fellow-beings come to gain more and more predominant sway. However ideal such altruistic sentiments may appear, we should never forget that they are grounded in reciprocal organic dependence. The living being, by force of his organization, is essentially a product of progressive generation, which links him organically to other members of his race," and conditions social and ethical solidarity.

"Social and ethical solidarity rests fundamentally on vital organization. Like all other vital development, progress of their existing condition is wrought by toilsomely acquired increments of organic elaboration. And this is effected through interaction of the individual with his social medium. It is in this laborious way that the increasingly reciprocal relations which constitute the growing solidarity of social and ethical sentiments become in us human individuals more and more fully organized. And they make themselves felt as originally realized in our social and ethical consciousness when they urge to conduct in agreement with the organized propensities. What is commonly called character consists in such structurally established propensities. And it is because of this structural consolidation and fixation that individual character is so insistent and persistent. Education, with its elaborate appurtenances, accomplishes its aim solely by modifying organic structure, so that it may potentially embody its teachings."

Without preestablished vital structure, in which mental potentialities inhere, consciousness of whatever kind is non-existent. Whatever is not actually organized in the living human being has, so far as he himself is concerned, no sort of reality. A person is color-blind because a specific region of his organic structure has remained undeveloped, failing thereby appropriately to react on the stimulating influences that normally arouse color-sensations. It is not otherwise with the morally obtuse, the