Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/603

 ORGANIC THEORY OF SOCIETY 589

helped to interpret it to itself, to turn it over, to uncover the virtual naturalism of it.

About the conception of the state as original and natural, instead of artificial or supernatural, the organic theory revolves. For this theory the contract is only mediative or definitive in the fullest sense ; it is not creative. Our present task, then, is to examine carefully the character of its mediation.

Accordingly, to begin the examination with a discussion that may seem even irrelevant to those who are disposed to look askance at the excursions of philosophy, the function of the social contract is quite akin to that of language. Indeed, to answer at once the possible charge of irrelevancy, language is distinctly a social institution, perhaps the social institution, and like any social institution it always implies contract even when it does not formally embody it. Implicitly, too, when not explicitly, it embodies authority in the way that makes govern- ment. Language, then, which in days gone by has also been viewed from a creationalistic standpoint witness the belief in a language-giver, in language as heaven-sent, or the notion that creatures using language are of a peculiar order, being extra- natural, or the doctrine of verbal inspiration, or the superstitions about occult powers in words and phrases is now very gener- ally regarded only naturalistically ; and this is very materially to change the character of the contract in it. Thus language is no longer the repository of a fixed truth or the seat of any mysterious power ; it is the medium only of a thought that lives in and with the whole life of mankind ; and it is original, being as much a condition as a result of conscious life, and above all mark- ing no distinctions in kind among living creatures. Its mediation, moreover, is threefold: (i) between the manifold experiences of any individual addicted to its use, one's language always being through the process of association only a focus of one's entire experience; (2) between the experiences of many indi- viduals or groups of individuals, language also always serving as a means of social communication ; and (3) between the experi- ences of humanity at large and the life as a whole, in a word, nature itself, to which men belong, language being always