332 THE AMERICA* JOURNAL OF SOCIOLO
of fiction or abstraction. There is nothing to it after all but people affecting each other in various ways. The thesis of this scries of papers is that from the interactions of individuals and generations there emerges a kind of collective mind evincing itself in living ideals, conventions, dogmas, institutions and religious sentiments which we find more or less happily adapted to, and adapting themselves to the task of safeguarding the col- lective welfare from the ravages of egoism. Whatever it may have been in caste communities or sacred aristocracies or priestly oligarchies, the society that " controls " is today too closely iden- tified with the mass to feel any great aloofness from the individ- uals it deals with. Originating in the community of many consciousnesses it does not place itself over against the indi- vidual in order to bully, browbeat and exploit him if it can. This public composed of living and dead is, if you will, a despot, but still a paternal, benevolent despot. Hence it is concerned not only with what harms the community, but with what harms the man himself. Society will not always repress vice as it represses crime, but it ceases not to warn its members against it.
Our schools do not fail to enlighten as to the care of health, assigning personal welfare as a motive where a Brahmin, a Magian or a Levite gave the will of the gods. Hygienic rite and sanitary observance that once people were awed into or trained into are now supported by appeals to prudence. Intem- perance is discouraged by showing its effect on the body, dissi- pation by forecasting nervous exhaustion. Sexual excess is opposed by exhibiting the medical sanctions of purity. In our rationalistic age the use of opium or cigarettes is connected not with curses of the Mount Ebal kind, but with nerve fatigue and brain blight. Thus by showing indulgence as sacrificing the future to the present or bartering health for momentary gratifica- tion, it is sought to offset the attractiveness of vice, especially the anti-social sort.
b. Psychological consequences. The likening of a bad action by the well-intentioned to the first patch of leprosy is not mere tumid rhetoric. Man at the reflective stage tends so strongly
