Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/615

 ORGANIC THEORY OF SOCIETY 6oi

production of new interests and new machinery ; and industrially with the meaning of the factory, or of our industrial institutions generally, by which the controlled power of nature is working a constant instead of a violent revolution, an evolution, in human life ; but fullness of meaning, even if what is commonplace has to be overloaded, is the business of philosophy. The French Revolution, then, so true to the meaning of the contract theory and so truly only a violent symptom of a condition permeating all Christendom, has been exemplified and justified in what we know so familiarly as the "wheels of industry;" but these "wheels," let us keep in mind, since here they must refer to all the devices by which nature is made to do man's work, are politi- cal as well as industrial, being in ways that need not be enumer- ated, not only makers, but also judges and executors of our laws. The French Revolution is with us still, as industrial evo- lution.

So, finally, life or movement, not established law, is the true basis of society. This, it is hardly necessary to say, is a part of the organic theory, and also it is the final meaning of the contract the- ory. Industrialism as uniting man and nature, organism or inter- nationalism as uniting man and man, and individualism as uniting each and every other part of man, have been our witnesses to the threefold mediation of the social contract, or to the roundness and completeness of the organic theory of society ; and in them all we can see, or from them all we must conclude, that society is a life, not a fixed condition ; a movement, not a creation of special time or place. Life, movement, is contract. The original social contract we have called a fiction, only a validating prin- ciple ; yet wisely, for in the light of modern thought it is but a lawyer's or historian's abstraction for something that underlies society, and that has no date or origin in history, for the fact of the life, which is the unity of society. Since the formulation of the contract theory there has been meaning in the words "social development."

A. H. LLOYD. THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN.