Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/530

 SM THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

up of atoms; but no theory of atoms alone will account before- hand for the behavior of the particular atoms that make hydrogen or oxygen or sulphur or phosphorus. Nor will any theory of the atom alone account for what happens when one pair of substances enter into a reaction, and the unlike results when another pair of substances react upon each other. The case is similar with the actions of individuals. All social facts are combinations of individual facts. Yet the influences at work in these combina- tions are not accounted for by any a priori conception of individ- uals which we can reach. For instance, a hundred socialistic German students are mustered into the imperial army and are sworn to defend the Kaiser and the flag. So long as they wear the uniform they are imperialists, not socialists. Now, there is something besides the sum of those individualities which is at work in giving them a character when they are combined that is different from the sum of their characters as isolated individuals. In this case the flag and the uniform may symbolize the added something. At all events it would be a very shallow and unpenetrating account that would find in the company merely one hundred detached and self-sufificient individuals.

It may be said that the individualistic view of history marks a sort of extreme swing of the pendulum from the fatalistic, mass notion of human affairs that prevailed before men were conscious of their own personal agency, before they had fairly differentiated themselves from their surroundings. It may be said that the task of finding out the facts about influences in society is virtually the task of finding the qualifications which must be thought of when we regard human fortunes as events of which individuals are the elements. It may be said that the individualistic view gives us a primary term in the social equation, and that our further work is to find out the value of the other terms which affect the value of the individual term. These propositions are no doubt approximately correct. The individ- ualistic conception of human affairs is not utterly false. It is a rough, uncritical, inexact exaggeration of a perception which must be reduced to more precise and proportionate formulation. Today's sociology is still struggling with this preposterous initial