selves. They include relatively fixed habits of thought and action. They are for the most part narrow and mechanical in their scope and belong to the general category of group morality. Every individual shows traces of several institutional selves. There is the self of the home, the church, the office, or the club. They have their ethical norms, their definite habitudes of the sentiments. Often these institutional selves exist side by side in the constitution of the same individual with relatively little influence upon each other. At a higher level we have what we may call the super-institutional self. It is much more comprehensive, more subtle, and unstable than the institutional selves. It includes that phase of the self each is forced to develop by virtue of the fact that his life always transcends the local institutional self. For the individual whose interests are associated with the various social groups and institutions is nevertheless a unity. The demand for personal integrity forces him to unify his experiences at a higher level. The exigencies of the moral life demand, therefore, the creation of a super-institutional self.

This super-institutional self has its individual as well as its more social phases, though, strictly speaking, the individual and the social are merely terms applied to phases of one whole of experience. At the heart of the super-institutional self lie the comprehensive ethical norms that are more or less common to all the various institutional selves. These are the general principles of action insisted upon for the maintenance of a healthful and enduring community life and include the norms regarded as basic in the moral economy of any given age. It is with these norms that we are concerned primarily in the study of the social conscience. We have seen that they vary with the shifts of the stresses and strains of the social order; they do not always occupy the same place in the scale of moral values of different periods. The super-institutional self of each individual always includes some of these norms. An enlightened and socialized character will include many of these norms. An individual completely and rationally socialized would be an epitome of the social conscience. Regard for a minimum of

these ethical principles is necessary to living peacefully with our fellows; the individual who repeatedly violates the right of property, for example, is speedily isolated; one who disregards human life may be eliminated entirely.

These norms of the super-institutional self function almost automatically in conventional moral judgments. When one owes a just debt and the time for payment arrives, in a vigorous moral character the mass of sentiments organized in terms of the norm of business honesty assert themselves almost automatically. The debt is paid and the element of obligation hardly enters consciously into the situation. Similarly where the issue involved is of a civic character that falls easily within the habitual ways of thinking and acting, a public duty may be performed in the same automatic fashion as in the case of the matter of private morality. For the social conscience is felt mainly in the application by the individual of those general ethical norms he shares with the rest of the better elements of the community, to an issue involving the good of all. The question as to whether a moral judgment is individual or social is primarily a question of the content of the subject rather than the predicate of the judgment.

This social phase of the super-institutional self is to be differentiated, however, from the more intimate and personal phases of the moral experience that are best illustrated in cases of conscience. The case of conscience is always accompanied by a sense of increased strain and mental uneasiness due to the fact that habitual and ready-made organizations of sentiments cannot be readily brought to bear on the problem. The situation, furthermore, is one usually that involves the self in its entirety or the master sentiment. This is seen in the fact that reflection is much more in evidence in cases of conscience than in the habitual moral decisions. In the latter case an "apperceiving mass" of sentiments and ideas functions immediately and without mental effort in sanctioning or rejecting the proposed act. In the case of conscience, however, the mind must canvass the entire situation and weigh the pros and cons. This often involves an entire

recasting of existing systems of sentiments or at least a critical survey of the self and the pronouncement of judgment in terms of the new mental synthesis that is thus created. This explains the feeling of isolation always felt in debating cases of conscience. The uniqueness and personal nature of the problem set the individual off from his fellows. He often finds himself at variance with the conventional sanctions of the community. For it is at this higher level of individual morality that new moral values are coined and points of departure are secured for moral progress.

$ 4. THE RELATION OF INSTITUTIONAL AND INDIVIDUAL SELVES TO THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE

Some of our most serious moral problems arise in connection with the relations between the social conscience, the institutional selves, and the intimate or private self. We have seen that the institutional selves play a most important rôle in shaping the social conscience. In the past the institutional self more than often dominated the situation entirely. The self shaped by the discipline of the church during the middle ages, for example, provided a broad schematic form within which the social and individual conscience developed. The same may be said of those theocratic forms of society that arose in Geneva, Scotland, and New England under the Calvinistic régime. The moral life was thoroughly institutionalized by church forms and dogmas that provided the source of authority and the measure of values in political, social, or business relations as well as in matters purely religious. In more recent times the state as developed under Prussian absolutism provided an illustration of a national morality that was cast for the most part in the mould of the political institutional self. For a while it seemed that the "big business" corporation was destined to play a similar rôle in American life.

In more progressive states, however, and especially in American democracy, the institutional selves do not dominate the situation. This is due primarily to the spirit of democ

cracy itself which will not be cribbed, cabined or confined in any such mechanical fashion. It is due also in no small degree to the sheer fact of the multiplication of the institutional selves. The complexity of our tense urban civilization and the richness and variety of the individual's activities tend to diminish materially the disciplinary effect of all institutions. Indeed in some of our large cities the tonic effect of a vigorous institutional life is almost entirely lacking. Consequently there is a feeling of inchoateness, of absence of conviction, and community of purpose most disconcerting to one interested in building up an intelligent and effective public sentiment. If history teaches us anything it is that without a vigorous and refined institutional life we can never hope to have an efficient public sentiment.

In the society of the future this complexity will in all probability increase rather than diminish. Could we bring every institution to recognize its possibilities for moral training this complexity might prove a help rather than a hindrance. For there is a uniqueness in the ethical quality of every institutional self that might be utilized to enrich the moral life. The church, for example, is in the position, as is no other institution, to stress the notes of brotherhood and the spiritual implications of the moral ideal. The university should cherish the intellectual virtues, the high and holy regard for truth that is the distinctive moral contribution of science. Office, shop, and mill offer a vast laboratory for discipline in the homelier virtues that are basic for business enterprise and industry. Every profession has its unique moral excellence. These various moral characteristics of the institutional self need of course to be fused into some sort of a unity by the sense of social responsibility. The church needs to realize, for example, that the mystical and idealistic phases of the moral peculiar to its institutional self must be strengthened and vitalized by scientific regard for the truth. Apart from the school and to a certain extent the home and the church, few institutions show any sense of responsibility for the type of self they are encouraging.

Serious problems have arisen in connection with the antagonisms between the institutional self and the intimate individual self. The institutional self, as the modern representative of the primitive group self or "tribal self," has always been opposed by the introspective individualistic self of reflective morality. Moral advance from the days of Socrates to the present has been made primarily through the emancipation of the private introspective self from the group self of tradition and authority. The triumphant individualism of American life is a manifestation of this individual self insisting upon its own self-sufficiency, its right to determine its own destiny. But Americans are coming to feel, as did Socrates faced with the emancipated youth of Athens, that this insistence upon the complete moral autonomy of the individual self is dangerous. An individualistic ethic has given us, to be sure, a sharpened sense of rights and duties, a deeper insight into the moral problem. But it has proven particularistic, fond of abstractions, relativistic, sceptical, even pessimistic in its attitude toward the moral ideal. It stands in need of the poise, the hopefulness, the consciousness of power gained through more intimate contact with the setting of institutional selves from which it has revolted.

Our immediate task is to take the enrichment of the moral experience, the deepened insight into moral truth gained by the individualistic self, and put them into use at the level of the institutional selves. The traditional group morality represented by the institutional self must be lifted to the level of the emancipated individual self. In this wise the individual self will regain that solidarity which it has lost and the institutional self will gain the enlightenment and moral sensitiveness it lacks.