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and put myself into psychic contact with the world. It would require far too long a catalogue to recount how those who have made science and literature and art and customs and constitutions and laws throng about a common life throughout a common day; how our lives go on with all the earth and all the ages in one process; how we live under the influence of the lawmakers of England and of Rome, the artists of Greece, and the prophets and apostles of Israel, and how we share in their greatness. It is not alone the few pre-eminent souls that live pervasive and immortal. We each partake of the greatness of our race ; and this, too, not alone in that we daily receive miraculous gifts for our physical and our spiritual lives, but also in the greatness of the service we return. Not Phidias only, but the mechanic of today, carving to the line the foreman drew nay, the carrier of the mortar gives immortality to the beauty that was Greece. The newsboy thanks to Gutenberg and his successors renders me an incredible service. And the mother in the nursery repeats the teachings of Christ, and as they fall from her lips they are as good as new and as potent of salvation. Like links in a chain we hang on all the past, and the future hangs on us. " Our gen- eration is a parliament of timeless persons, of whom we, the living, are the least. By the fiction of death those are supposed to be absent who actually hold the balance of power." 21 And when we ourselves "join the majority" it will be a governing majority, for we then shall be a part of the past that will have created a new present. What that new present is to be waits on the actions of today. The social process is unbroken. In it we all enjoy an immortality that reaches backward so that we share the wisdom and inspiration of race-experience, and reaches for- ward into the greater blessing or the cursing for which we prepare. .
The society we seek to understand is not so much a being as a becoming. That which becomes is human experience and activity of various types, to some of which we give the name of institu- tions. The causal conditions from which they emerge are more intricate than the causes of other phenomena, but perhaps not
n Professor Small in American Journal of Sociology, November, 1900, p. 377.
