Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/205

 SOCIAL AND ETHICAL INTERPRETATIONS 19 1

cannot have true thoughts about itself save in consequence of right actions, and the teaching of the book is that, for the initia- tive in action that goes beyond convention and law and custom, society is dependent upon the truly inventive individuals in its midst, i. e., the morally inventive — the individuals who have a getiius for action and for thoughts that are morally and socially fruitful.

The closing reference to the value and the reality of the thoughts about duty that individuals may and do have is, to my mind — as indicated earlier — a counter-active to everything in the book, and in the legion of contemporary books upon social ethics and social psychology and philosophy, that seems to merge the individual in a mere relation of ego and alter, in any action-content, any mere set or order of common duties, any mere "common thought-situation," any mere "moving-equili- brium," of social force in conflict with or in union with cosmic force. The closing suggestion and afifirmation that, in the case of a final conflict between social requirements and an individual's own conception of his duty — that, in such a case, "?u)thifig can be dotie," that the individual must be left to do what he conceives to be his martyr duty, and that society must be left to mark the nonconformity of the individual by the hemlock, or the cross, or the bullet, or the ostracism that is so hard to bear — all this is the best possible proof that Mr. Baldwin has, to his own mind, been describing, not a mere logical dialectic, but a real process of action and reaction between individual persons and their envi- ronment, and that he would not put forward his theory of the socius as a dogmatic definition of personality. The last emphasis of his essay is upon personality, and upon the whole reality of per- sonality as consisting in a possible unswerving and immediate response to duty, duty having, as he rightly insists, no complete logical sanction. That is, the reality of a personal being is made to consist in a necessary progression in the direction of duty ; and the whole content of duty is made to consist in an active and progressive personal relation to a world of persons. No sounder view of personality or of conscience has ever been taken. The merit of it, in Mr. Baldwin's case, consists in his having