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 592 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

itself over the whole field of consciousness. 1 To this extension as belonging to modern thought reference was made above, and with peculiar significance to our present interest we find the promise, if not the actual fulfillment, of it even in Locke, to whom Professor McLaughlin aptly ascribes a "compact psychol- ogy" as well as a compact political philosophy. 2 Thus, Locke's nominalism was no mediaeval scholasticism, nurtured in the clois- tered abstraction of ancient texts ; rather it was a doctrine of sensations in general as well as of words, of man as thinking or as being self-conscious in environment at large as well as in written or spoken language ; so that a doughtier advocate of naturalism than Locke himself would be hard to find. In both psychology and literature, then, formalism brought the call for a return to nature, and it is hardly necessary to add that the naturalism so arising was identical with that which we saw to emerge from the political theory of contract.

But more direct than any historical analogies or than parallels of any sort is the fact that the same threefold media- tion which today language is recognized as exercising has belonged to the social contract, more narrowly conceived, that is, to any political constitution of modern times. The conditions of the quasi-contract, in language or in natural environment, have actually been consciously recognized and formulated in modern constitutions. Thus, with the rise and evolution of the contract theory, and this is to say, with the rise and evolution of constitutional governments, political life, changing from abso- lute monarchy to limited monarchy, or even to avowed democ- racy, has developed very positively along the lines ( I ) of personal and national individuality, (2) of national and inter- national organization, and (3) of an industrial life which has

1 Illustrations of the implicit, when not open, extension of the idea of language are to be found, not merely in the doctrine of evolution, in the schools for the blind and the mute, in the rise of the natural sciences and of laboratory methods, but also in the invention of elaborate notations and terminologies, particularly among the sciences, even including formal logic, and in such changes in practical affairs as that in religion from church and book to home and man, and that in civic life from no diversion for the people beyond verbal direction of all kinds to diversion also through open museums and public parks, all nature becoming a medium of man's rational Hie.


 * Op. cit., p. 467, note.