1 8 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
into the body of its experience, less valuable ones must take their place. When thinking fails, hallucination is possible is necessary, until death comes. " But this is determinism." Nay, not so ; for freedom does not consist in the power to create or destroy impulses, but rather to choose among them. To be free is to be permitted to choose one's master, not to be master- less.
With a legitimate pride in intelligence, we say that mind makes the world ; that its reality is the reality which shines in things ; that the tender heart, the clear thought, and the rugged will are qualities like unto God's. In short, we are idealists, and we confess that consciousness is the only development that is worth our care; that consciousness is of social nature, and does not express itself save in the interactions of being's whole ; that there are ranks and dignities in its appearances ; and yet, with such a faith, we stand idly by and witness consciousness depraved to hallucination in our fellows. We rise in our wrath when we are told that men must work in conditions which destroy their bodies. May we not be quite as careful that they need not per- vert their minds? But how? By a process called education, and but imperfectly known among us ; a process of organizing the interests of the universe into the experience of each man, so that he shall no longer lack for anything, but in himself possess the fullness of the whole.
Yet it must be confessed that a certain pitiable inertia obtains among men, whereby they are too easily satisfied with lesser forms of experience, and far too little prone to look around to a worthier form of being. In that he does not rise and then assert his own dignity, the man who drinks is responsible for his own condition. To say that society is to blame is to make but a poor abstraction. Society, as different from men, is no scape- goat. It is men themselves who are the scapegoats, and most of all those men who with our common talents bring such a poor accounting in.
And yet the opportunities for choice are not quite even. If communism is due to obtain anywhere, it must be in the realm of intelligence. As yet it does not obtain there. The greatest
