environment. The growth of social self-consciousness means, therefore, increase of the community's power to control the course of its development.

With the growth of social self-consciousness inevitably the community will bring to bear upon its problems in a much more intelligent and comprehensive fashion the mature moral sense embodied in the social conscience. Instead of confining the play of the moral judgment to individual or group interests men will come to include the larger problems of society. This will involve, on the one hand, an increasing sensitiveness to the fact that certain general moral convictions are shared by all and are felt to be of vital importance for all, and, on the other hand, the enlargement of the classes of objects to which these common ethical principles of social righteousness are applied. For the problem of securing an effective social conscience is not so much a matter of creating entirely new ethical categories wherewith to solve the issues of a new social order as it is the problem of expanding and socializing the ethical content of previous social experience. In an enlightened and progressive community the intellect plays over the various social issues and, on the basis of a keen appreciation of their relations to social welfare, arrives at a moral evaluation of them through the application of tested moral experience of the past.

Finally, we have every reason to believe that the recent world struggle will add to the social conscience of the future the international or cosmopolitan note. The age of the world has at last arrived when it is not only possible but imperatively necessary that we should embody in the moral sentiments of the humblest citizen the old Stoic dictum: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. For this great ideal is now no more a matter of sentimental humanitarianism but of immediate and practical statecraft. The social consciences of the nations must be reorganized in terms of the common interests and ideals of a family of nations before we can hope to realize Kant's dream of "perpetual peace". The new internationalism of the future must be based upon the organization of the sentiments of the private citizen.

§3. TYPES OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE

What should be the ideal form of the social conscience in a democracy? It is possible to distinguish types of social consciences just as we distinguish types of character. The strong character is the result of strong and thoroughly organized sentiments. Sometimes one sentiment dominates all the others and becomes the "master passion" in the individual's life. These furnish favorite types for the literary artists, illustrations of which are the sentiment of ambition in Cardinal Woolsey or of avarice in Balzac's Eugénie Grandet. Strength of will is a matter of the strength of the sentiments. "In the sentiments alone are resolutions formed, and choice manifested between their sometimes conflicting ends; they only give the will to control emotion, and to be steadfast unto the end. Strength or weakness of will, other things equal, varies with the strength or weakness of the emotion or sentiment to which it belongs; and hence it is that we find the same man strong in some directions and weak in others every strong sentiment has a tendency to develop a strong will in its support.'

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Social groups and even nations illustrate similar traits of unity and forcefulness owing to the disciplinary effect upon the average man of some dominant phases of public sentiment. The solidarity of sentiment created by the slave-owning South owing to the disciplinary effect of her "peculiar institution" created a unity and effectiveness of the social will which enabled that section to maintain a position of power in the nation far beyond its real importance. The presence for half a century of millions of emancipated negroes in the same section has brought about another unification of sentiment in the white group in the "color line." All issues, political, educational, moral, or religious that fail to harmonize with the demands of this powerful system of sentiments are rejected. The unity of national will that has made Germany such a formidable antagonist in the war just ended is due primarily to the complete unity of sentiment which, thanks to Prussian statecraft, was secured 1 Shand, Foundations of Character, p. 65.

through the identification of the sentiment of patriotism with the ambitions of an unscrupulous military beaurocracy.

It has been pointed out that a fruitful source of weakness in individual characters is due to the fact that the lower systems of emotions emancipate themselves from the higher systems of the sentiments and assume control. This is especially true in the case of persons of hysterical temperament. We have here in reality a partial disintegration of personality. Lower, imperfect, and irrational selves usurp the rôle of the true self. Something very similar to this often takes place in American society and it is always an indication of moral immaturity due to the absence of an intelligent and highly-organized social conscience. "There are many lines of evidence which converge in proof that we are still an emotional people. We are an empire with varying measures of economic and social development in the different parts. We are civilized and barbarous at the same time. We have millions of primitive black men and more millions of primitive white men, both native and foreign born. We have Kentucky and Kansas and Colorado, and then we have Massachusetts. But not to speak of the contradictions of localities, there are not wanting indications that the mental mode of our entire population is still emotional. The churches in which feeling, belief, and authority are dominant have by far the largest membership. The 'solid' South as well as certain 'solid' portions of the North bear eloquent testimony to the reign of prejudice instead of independent thought in politics. The feuds in the Southern mountains, the lynchings of black men and white on both sides of Mason and Dixon's line, the mob spirit in industry, attest the rule of impulsive social action over great numbers of men." 1

This large amount of undisciplined emotion in American life has been a fruitful source of moral laxity. We may distinguish two types of this unregulated emotionalism. In mob violence we have as a usual thing the temporary usurpation of the rôle of the social conscience by lower irrational and highlyemotional systems of feeling. There is evidence to support 1 F. M. Davenport, Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals, pp. 299 f.

the contention that in certain sections of the country social habits have been developed through the constant yielding to these lower anti-social systems of instinctive feeling, especially in the case of lynching and mob violence. Davenport calls attention to the fact that the three adjacent counties of Kentucky, Logan, Simpson, and Todd, which contain onefortieth of the total population of the state and one-sixth of the lynchings during the last twenty years, are also the counties in which the wildest emotional excesses occurred during the famous religious revivals of 1800. During the early part of the last century these counties were the scene of fierce and bloody feuds. Here we have a striking evidence in this coarser type of emotionalism of the lack of a mature and self-controlled moral sentiment. There is no more painful evidence of the lack of a sensitive social conscience than the fact that it is almost impossible to secure the conviction of the lyncher in those sections where lynching has become a social habit.

Another illustration of the moral immaturity of the social conscience and of its lack of poise is found in fanaticism. The lack of moral balance in the fanatic is not due, as in the case of the exponent of the lynch-law, to a surrender to the lower, irrational emotional system. More than often the fanatic orients his moral loyalties around ideas that are abstract, unreal, sometimes extravagant, and fantastic. His lack of moral balance is due to his moral hyper-sensitiveness. "Fanaticism frequently originates in acuteness of the moral sensibilities. Many, with or without hyper-suggestibility, seem too sensitive to endure contact with human life; to them are abhorrent the follies, sins, vices, and crimes which co-exist with the highest civilization yet attained. They have an almost irresistible tendency to make their own consciences the test of the sincerity and honesty of others. When the darkest side of social and political life is suddenly revealed to one of these acutely sensitive spirits, educated in the bosom of virtue and refinement, it may transform him into a misanthrope or arouse him to a conflict with evil, soon to become the most rampant

fanaticism." Puritanism has provided us with some excellent illustrations of religious fanaticism while the classic illustration of the political and social fanatic is John Brown, the hero of Harper's Ferry.

The very idealism of our American life has made it possible to breed the fanatic. Carlyle has remarked, "A man once committed headlong to republican or any other transcendentalism, and fighting and fanaticizing amid a nation of his like, becomes as it were enveloped in an ambient atmosphere of transcendentalism and delirium ". This was written of the excesses of the French Revolution but it describes in extreme form the menace that is always associated with devotion to lofty and inspiring and yet ill-defined loyalties. The fanatic is a protest against the failure of the social conscience to seize on these lofty spiritual values and make them real in the lives of men and women. He needs the discipline of an effective social conscience hardly less than the moral Philistine he condemns, for he lacks the moral balance and the sobering sense of reality that only an efficient social conscience can give him.

We should expect, then, the most socially valuable type of individual as well as of society where we have a wellbalanced system of sentiments. In the balanced character, which was the ancient Greek ideal, we have an organization of instincts, emotions and sentiments without any overexaggeration of any one element. Unity of personality is achieved through the harmony of strong and well-developed tendencies which hold each other in check. No one human capacity is atrophied in the interest of another. This equilibration of powers in an individual varies indefinitely according to the individual. We may find it in the conventional average man who eats, drinks, sleeps, goes to his office, and spends an evening with friends, preserving always the even tenor of his way. We may find it in the genius. Each ability, whether of the genius or of the man of mediocrity, finds its place in an equilibrated whole, just as each must find his place in a social

1 James M. Buckley, "Fanaticism in the United States," The Century, Dec., 1903, p. 197.