Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/373

 THE SOCIAL WILL 357

have yet to demonstrate that any real disadvantage would come to their political science in any of its departments if they should openly avow their isolated sovereignties as only fictitious and then admit to the front part of their house the world-wide unity of real sovereignty. That this unity is albeit in a special sense divisible is not to be denied, and none so cordially as they would welcome its divisibility; but it remains a unity throughout. In ways that I have been at special pains to explain, it implies all the division and opposition that the most jealous of nations could ever covet, but the division is of the sort that ful- fils instead of destroying, and an active internationalism, rest- lessly maintaining a balance of power and imperial in its scope, is the only program that any practical politician could ever honestly deduce from it.

And now, lastly, the historian and the political scientists are mild objectors when compared with the moralists and the theo- logians. A doctrine of the social will that appears to undermine the very foundations of morality by denying personal respon- sibility, making all men, as it does, indifferently parties to a single life, is distinctly offensive. To mix Greek and barbarian is to them of only slight moment, one way or the other ; but to mix Christian and pagan, righteous and unrighteous, is intolerable. Yet who has really denied personal responsibility? Any person conscious of the meaning of his activity is personally responsible; and, although it may be true that all men are made parties to the social life as a single life, yet the distinctions that make morality are not disturbed one jot or tittle. Instead they seem to me to be more firmly established, for the only denial has been that the distinction of righteous and unrighteous or Christian and pagan can ever be made on purely party lines. All in society are good and bad, righteous and unrighteous, Christian and pagan, perhaps theist and atheist together, so that what we have here is no betrayal of the distinctions of morality and religion, but the simple assertion that such distinctions are as individually personal as they are social. No one is ever the one thing or ever the other thing to himself alone ; no one is without his share of both things. But, still unconvinced, the insistent object-