Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/377

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 363

Brief inspection of this detail leads to the suspicion that, though its universality in observable associations is no less demonstrable than that of the other incidents in our schedule, it is nevertheless an incident of a different order from most of those of which we have spoken. However this may be, we are at present able to make out the reality of this incident rather as a statical principle, as a condition of equilibrium in a relatively developed association, than as a fully actualized condition in all associations. Perhaps we have here a clue to the consummation foreshadowed in the mystical term "equality." Major Powell finds the essence of the equality that is indicated as a condition of a stable civic situation, in "Equality of voice or vote in the council .... The law of equality in demotic bodies is the law of equality to assert judgments." J We would extend the con- cept somewhat. We would say that individuality has normal scope in an association only when each individual is the equal of every other individual in liberty to find expression for his whole personality. Stable equilibrium, the permanence of order, is secured in proportion as each man's consciousness of interest is on an equality with each other man's consciousness of interest in freedom from arbitrary restraints upon attempts to get satisfac- tion. The semblance or degree of order in a society depends upon the approximation of that society to the practical realiza- tion of this equality. In other words, social order rests upon the feeling among members of the society that they enjoy approximate equality of freedom to realize each his own indi- viduality. The condition of equality, and likewise the order of society, is disturbed when consciousness of interest of any one class is permitted to suppress the like interest of another class.

For instance, the priestly conception of religion as mani- fested in the theory represented by Gregory VII. and Innocent III. put a fantastic fiction of religious authority residing in one class of men in place of the inborn religious need of all men, and the indicated equality of all men in adjusting themselves to that need. So long as men do not actually recognize their religious

l American Anthropologist, July, 1899, pp. 498, 499.