Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/665

 SOCIAL CONTROL 651

lence or knowledge instead of for booty or for women ? Shall we credit the ascent of Pisgah to the seers and poets, who, like Merlin, have caught the splendor of a new gleam, and beckoned the multitude to follow it? Was it Isaiah who enamored humanity of justice, ^Eschylus who charmed it with heroic duty, Dante who made purity precious, Petrarch who taught men how to love, Thomas a Kempis who made the spiritual life inviting, Goethe who gave self-culture supreme value ? While these stand out as the authors of uplifts that really required the cooperation of many men greater and lesser, we can freely grant the role of invention and the worth of individual initiative in the slow mounting of the human spirit to finer joys and nobler aims. All honor to the men of insight and imagination who pioneered the race up from the bog of animal satisfactions ! But apart from great men we can detect in mere association cer- tain forces of uplift.

Human beings after they are associated do not glance coolly about them, survey deliberately the desire-awakening contents of existence, and choose each for himself at what goods he will level his endeavor. Their communication one with another begets reciprocal suggestion, exchange of ideas, transfusion of feelings. By the channels of intercourse there is set in circula- tion a mass of beliefs and desires, which, as they do not exist in any individual mind, might, without straining the metaphor, be termed the contents of the social mind. It is the shaping power of these which makes society the silent partner in nearly all the weighings and choosings of associated man.

If the desires and ideas thrown out and set circulating by Tom and Dick and Harry merely met and blended, the net result of social intercourse would be the lessening of individual differences and the emergence of types. In the social mind would be formed a composite photograph of each class of elements contributed by Tom, Dick, and Harry to the common stock ; and in this image would the member of the group be fashioned.

But such is not the fact. There is at work here a principle of selection and survival which brings about a development in