Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/355

Rh the mischief of a political boss—has the companionship, and lives by virtue of the companionship, of a larger, a deeper, and a broader and more lasting expression of itself. Society, the sphere of this larger expression, is thus a party to every deed and every thought of the individual. All of which is possibly only to say once more that society is an organism; but we have dismissed the word.

And now try another approach. Who is not familiar with the doctrines of earlier days about society, some of them making individuals primary in the order of nature, and society an afterthought, as if a means at some time devised for selfish ends; and some making, not society the special creation of individuals, but individuals the creatures of society? Whence such doctrines arose and what purposes of man's history they served are interesting inquiries; but they cannot occupy us at this time, and we have, besides, a way of dealing with them and with their entire retinue, that is, to say the least, effective. With as much of dogma as can be allowed in so rationalistic an age, we declare that only realities are really important, and that realities are somehow eternal, equally original or primary, and always contemporary, and, if together so early and so constantly, then more to each other than any ordinary partners; and, with this pronouncement, as if they were some unfriendly spirits confronted by the exorcism of a priest, all questions of mere origin or of mere destiny, of temporal sequence or precedence, take an ignominious flight, and the place is cleared for serious thought. In short—and just this must occupy us—society and individuals, in so far as real at all, are co-real, contemporaneous in origin and contemporaneous in development, and inquiries after their temporal order are impertinent.

But the rare atmosphere of mere theory, which—somewhat after Emerson—is the over-candor of human knowledge, is surrounding us completely; and, before it is too late, we will descend to what Emerson again might call the obscurity or obfuscation of the concrete, by which a dazzling light is diffused or refracted, and so adapted to human eyes. Socialism and individualism are well-known programs in the moral and political activity of