Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/605

 ORGANIC THEORY OF SOCIETY 591

theory, making society and justice the mere afterthought of individuals, should have found expression ? It is true that there was another side to Greek life, that with the growing for- malism the barriers between Greek and barbarian, as if between civilized man and natural man, were breaking down, and that the Sophists and politicians brought the Socratic philosophers and Alexander with them ; but already we have seen that the con- tract theory also has another side. In many respects, too, as is often recognized by historians, the time of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau was like that of the Sophists and Socrates. A time of transition and revolution ? Yes ; and also a time when lan- guage, not to mention other social institutions, or even not to mention environment at large, was become formal and mechani- cal. Latin was dead, or at least on its death-bed, rapidly losing its hold upon life except as a church ritual or a school discipline ; and, although a new literature, a new poetry, was developing, this had its hard conflict with the mechanical ingenuity and offensive lucidity of Pope in England and the inventions from flourishing schools of poetry in France, method as is natural for a time of great changes superseding depth of meaning in importance ; and with this modern emphasis on method, as with the ancient, society was naturally supposed to be due to con- tract, the social relation to be external to individual experiences, mere legality to be an end in itself. Everything was thought to be acquired ; a rational education could do anything, even make genius. The literary formalism, however, had its own corrective, for, in the first place, it was applied to the national languages, which superseded Latin, and such application could not but end by making the externalism, the supernaturalism ficti- tious, by turning it into naturalism, bringing language, the medium of the social life, into living relation with the experi- ences of the people. Thus the respect that we have today for dialects is but a fuller development of this movement begun in the early days of the modern contract theory. And, in the second place, a literary formalism, in which a particular language lost sanctity, gave rise, not merely to a group of living national languages, but also to an extension of the idea of language