Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/368

 354 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

and when he has reached the limit of his opportunity or of his power, he is no longer recognizable as a child of the soil. He is the manufactured product of urban conditions. His apparent personality is that of an actor almost lost to view on the world's stage, but if it is closely scrutinized, it appears to be a personality formed for and formed by some minute division of the city's labor. The farmer has become the city man, not alone by virtue of changing his location ; he remains the farmer still, until he specializes his individuality. He accomplishes this change by adjusting his individuality more minutely with some minutiae of the social process. Indeed, objective morality is socialization. The unmoral or the immoral man is the social unfit or misfit. The moral man is the man so nicely adjusted to the social conditions that the life-process proceeds within and by means of him with relatively high precision. Association may again be described truly but partially as the integration of distinct individuals into the common process.

X. A subjective environment. This phrase seems to have been coined by Lester F. Ward. 1 The argument in which it occurs attempts to refute a certain dogma of the freedom of the will, and to show that all volitions depend upon antecedents. These are principally internal, and constitute what may be called the "subjective environment." Professor Ward discusses at length what is involved in this conception. It is so much more familiar in essentials than some of the other categories in our schedule that elaboration may be omitted. Professor Patten has made use of the same phrase, though in an argument which seems on the whole somewhat gratuitous. 2 Unless we desire to weave a tissue of esoteric mystery, there seems to be no more reason at this point than elsewhere in social analysis for anything but straightforward description of the familiar. The fact that corresponds with the phrase which we have chosen as a name for this incident is so obvious and so commonplace that it is difficult to realize that it deserves high rank among scientific data. We instinctively grope after something beyond to take

1 Dynamic Sociology, Vol. II, p. 321.

"Annals of the American Academy, November, 1894, pp. 404 sy.