Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/171

 A SOCIOLOGICAL VIEW OF SOVEREIGNTY I 57

higher spiritual and the baser immoral wants, wholly lacking. Food, clothing, shelter, literature, art, religious beliefs, luxuries, intoxicants, poisons, are all simply the services which other peo- ple are continually offering to the individual. In consuming them he controls their services. And in doing so he is simply expressing his choices. But choice is the very core of self- consciousness. Here is the close relation between property and self-consciousness, each of which is the cause of the other. The progress of society and of the person may, with truth, be said to be the increasing range and variety of choices open to self-con- sciousness. The modern man who can choose all the way from food and clothing to pianos, paintings, and books, is far more deeply conscious of his own inner nature than the savage whose only choice is between food and hunger. It may be objected that the criterion of self-consciousness is the personal character of the one who chooses, rather than the range of choices. But both go together. One's capacity to choose (the biological brain capacity having been developed) is the outcome of an education which from childhood to manhood has consisted sim- ply in opening up to him step by step the wider and wider ranges of choices which the services of his fellow-men afford. These services in civilized society are embodied mainly in mate- rial products — food, books, buildings, etc. — these are vehicles of personality, the tangible commodities in which human services are preserved for consumption. But the primitive man, devoid of commodities, begins to have a wide range of choice only when he has someone to serve him directly. T. H. Green says' that appropriation, being one condition of the existence of property, " implies the conception of himself on the part of the appropri- ator as a permanent subject for whose use, as instruments of satisfaction and expression, he takes and fashions certain external things, certain things external to his bodily members. These things, so taken and fashioned, cease to be external as they were before. They become a sort of extension of the man's organs, the constant apparatus through which he gives reality to his ideas and wishes." Green here has in mind the modern man

■ Principles of Political Obligation, p. 214.