Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/361

 THE SOCIAL WILL 345

nature and so impossible either as community without differ- ences or as mere aggregation of differences.

As to society being community, it is true that, if a number of people speak the same language and live under the same laws, and go, perhaps, to the same church and move in the same social circle, they will all seem to be having a common experience, and in terms of this a strictly social self which is quite independent of the accidents of individuality; but the seeming here is wholly due to a confusion of social life with the visible and only appar- ently unvarying medium through which it is expressed. Car- penters and brewers and merchants and college professors may all unite under one outer form of religious worship, and with the fact of their union may themselves associate, and even sentimen- tally enjoy, a common nature, which they regard unworldly or spiritual because so seemingly independent of carpentry and brewing and teaching. No common ritual, however, no com- mon language, no common anything has ever either given men a common life or been developed by them to satisfy such a life. Community, in fact, were it ever realized, instead of being a basis of social life, would be and could be only its undoing. The brewer and the professor at church may sing the same hymns and recite the same prayers and hear the same music ; but the brewer must have his envy or his feeling of superiority for the professor, and the professor, perhaps, for the merchant, while the wives of all three are watching each other's bonnets ; and, without detracting an iota from the religious value of the meeting, the tension of these individual relations is no small part of that which gives zest to all those spiritual things that are said in chorus or done in unison. At the school or the church, at the concert perhaps, or in any place where you and two or three others are gathered together, are you not always conscious of your neighbor, say with sympathy or jealousy or fear or hope, in a way that shows your interest in him to have anything but a basis of mere spiritual community? Even sympathy feeds and has to feed on personal difference. The real function, then, of any social institution, of language or ritual, of law or prop- erty, must be something like that of the rules or forms of a