Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/486

 472 FERDINAND TONNIES : to moral opinions and concepts. With respect to these, customary language has a characteristic function. Its con- nexions with natural feelings and habits, but also with popular beliefs and with valid norms of judgment, appear here most clearly. The current predicates which are applied to tendencies, actions, characters and men, belong to the words which express as sole significance, or include in their significance, an affirmation or negation approval or dis- approval of the speaker. But to this subjective relation they give the form of an objective quality (as is also the case, according to the teaching of reformed physics, in a somewhat different sense, with sensations). Now though in many details scope is allowed for individual freedom, hence to doubt and conflict, yet the principles of moral thinking are so deeply embedded in language, that an offence against them is felt and negated not only as an infringement of customary language, but also and principally as a moral crime. The approval or disapproval which is open i.e. made known through words or other signs whether general or singular, of actions, principles, etc., is itself as an action the basis of public approval or disapproval, and whatever may issue therefrom. But the social will of this publicity by no means coincides with that which embodies itself in language and its usage. Of the former there are many kinds, the spheres of which do indeed in many ways cross the spheres of a customary use of language, and here and there coincide, but to a certain extent include it and to a certain extent are contained in it. Social ranks, classes, strata, callings, political bodies, corporations, parties, religious communities, sects, churches, artistic and scientific schools and tendencies each such group has, at any rate in some particulars, its own judgments as to that which is to be called good or bad, praiseworthy or objectionable to a large extent also as to that which is true or false. For this too involves affirmation and negation, and not alone because the true is sought and the false avoided, but because by the laws of human nature we generally affirm what is willed as true, and what is not willed as false. Every such group, if unanimous at all, is so concerning that which it wills whether this is expressed in habits, or laws, in confessions of faith or of science ; and this gives to each a special usage in the application of those affirming and negating names. Some- times these names, even when they take the verbal form of qualities, are only intended to denote and announce the will, but sometimes they certainly claim to be really applicable to things, hence to be valid also as truths. Now philosophers