Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/595

 THE PHILOSOPHY OF VALUE 579

our own proper essence also belongs — constitute objectively a unified interrelationship, which is divided into a multiplicity of independent series or motives only after the interposition of our interests, and in order to be manipulated by us. Accordingly, each science investigates phenomena which possess an exclusive unity, and clean-cut lines of division from the problems of other sciences, only from the point of view which the special science pro- poses as its own. Reality, on the other hand, has no regard to these boundary lines, but every section of the world presents a conglomeration of tasks for the most numerous sciences. Likewise our practice dissects from the external or internal complexity of things one-sided series. Notice, for example, into how many systems a forest is divided. These in turn become objects of special interest to a hunter, a proprietor, a poet, a painter, a civic official, a botanist, and a tourist. The forest is objectively always the same. It is a real, indivisible unity of all the determinations and relationships out of which the interested parties select each a certain group, and make it into a picture of the forest. The same is the case with the great systems of interest of which a civilization is composed. We distinguish, for instance, interests and relationships as the ethical, the egoistic, the economic, the domestic, etc. The reciprocal weaving together of these con- stitutes actual life. Certain of these, however, dissociated from this concrete reality, constitute the content of the civic struc- ture. The state is an abstraction of energies and reciprocal actions which, in the concrete, exist only within a unity that is not separable into its parts. Again, in like manner, pedagogy abstracts from the web of cosmic contents into the totality of which the pupil is subsequently to enter certain ones, and forms them into a world which is completely abstract, in comparison with reality. In this world the pupil is to live. To what extent all art runs a division line of its own through the conditions of things, in addition to those that are traced out in the real struc- ture of the objective world, needs no elaboration. In opposition to that naturalism which wanted to lead art away from the selective abstraction, and to open to it the whole breadth and unity of reality, in which all elements have equally rights, in so