Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/360

 344 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

and beholding its wonderful activities we can know its adapta- tions, and, above all, our adaptation to it, and feel with assurance that the life about us is our life ; enough if we are not merely in it, but also actively and consciously of it. It is then our responsibility, and it imposes no more arduous duty upon us than the duty of what we are already doing ; a present duty, surely, and a real freedom which mechanicalism gives, not takes away.

And now we may turn to the social will. Two things stand out clear before our view: (i) the social will can be neither a common will nor an aggregate will ; it must, on the contrary, be the will of individuals to whom society is essential, or of society that actually has its being in individuals ; and (2) the social will can be subject to no sentimental idealism of the sort that dreams of what is past or waits on the future ; it has, and must have, for its constant business only the actual social life, and to this end it is and must be one with that life, not outside of it nor ever peculiar to any isolated part of it.

The first of these assertions is evidently in sympathy with the idea that society and individuality are inseparable, if not so mutually inclusive as to be virtually identical. Subject to this idea, not only the social will, but also the social consciousness, which, as a matter of course, is not to be separated from the will, can be neither common nor aggregate. In theory and in prac- tice, however, men have frequently treated the will and the con- sciousness of society now as common, it being imagined that to the members of society there belonged a common nature, and so a common life back of and independent of their differences, and now as aggregate, it being again imagined that a lot of indi- vidual wills could come to a sort of unity or equilibrium, say a state of armed neutrality, and so acquire a social character ; but, quite apart from the idea of society and individuality that has been emphasized here, it is idle to think of any really social life based either upon the aggregation of individuals or upon a com- mon nature that could be only in individuals, not of them. More- over and this is an idea that will gain in meaning as we proceed society is really to be thought of as dynamic in its