Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/472

 4S8 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

in life. Nor is social unity to be found even in a devotion to art. Music, painting, sculpture, and other forms of an essentially aesthetic life have never succeeded in building up a united society. Greece with its arts was more divided than even Judea with its refusal to make to itself a graven image. The aesthetic life is a product, not a source, of social con- ditions. When the Romans first conquered Greece, they thought they should have a knowledge of Greek music ; but a Greek orchestra only bored the conquerors, until a centurion divided the musicians into two bands and ordered them, as they played, to advance toward each other as if in battle. When once this was done, the Romans broke forth in loud applause. War they knew ; music they could appreciate only as it simulated war. Perhaps men have grown less frank in the expression of their opinions, but, inestimably valuable as is art in all its forms, social millennia will never spring from symphony concerts and art exhi- bitions. Culture is too much a matter of the individual, too much an acquisition. The great elemental things in life are, and always have been and always must be, the basis of united social action. Within the physical sphere, for example, there is the passion for food. A nation rises or dies as one man if starvation be upon it. There is the passion for fighting- — inherited from a savage past, it is true, but something which, as almost nothing else, links men together with unbreakable bonds. A little higher is the elemental desire to acquire property. From the days of Tyre and Sidon this desire has broken across geographical wastes and bound people of different races together. There is hardly a stronger bond of union than that of commercial interest, and commerce rises superior even to the brutal elemental passion for war, and demands that there shall be arbitration where formerly men rushed headlong into battle.

But hunger and fighting and the desire for property are not the only elements of human life. Besides them and above them there are such things as faith, a trust in some power outside oneself, the instinct to pray, the belief that in some way the world is not the result of a toss-up of chance, and that, once made by a God, it has not been abandoned by its Creator.