Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/366

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352 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

of unlike individuals. It is true that in the ideal monogamous family man and wife are one ; it is more literally and evidently true that, whether the family is ideal or not, man and wife are two. So also in a rising scale in other, more complex associations. We are, of course, repeating a commonplace, with the modifica- tion that it is not commonplace. We shall lay further emphasis presently under another rubric upon the fact that individuals are different and remain different. The specification upon which we now insist is rather that the associated state is a process of mak- ing them different. Association diversifies personalities. It puts premiums upon special developments. It encourages a trait in one, it represses a trait in another. It rewards this man's per- formance, it penalizes that man's propensity. It gives more scope to each of the activities normal to all individuals and to the rare activities peculiar to exceptional individuals. If we take the genetic view of the social process, we may describe it in this aspect as a progressive production of more and more dissimilar men. Each change in the social situation affords a new outlet for personal idiosyncrasy, and presents new incitements to varia- tion of conduct and character. The proverb that " it takes all sorts of people to make the world" is only one side of the reality. It takes the world to make all sorts of people, is equally true of the same reality. The limits of the possibilities latent in people will not be discovered until the social world has reached the limits of its development. The social movement takes place through propagation of untold varieties of persons. Production of personal differentiations might be fixed upon as an approxi- mate expression for the whole output of the social process. Our whole schedule is cumulative warning that such a view is partial. Human association is a process made up of processes, of which the present detail is a sample, each of which seems to cover the whole range ; all of which together, however, are necessary to the completeness of each.

IX. Socialization. The same facts otherwise viewed yield the apparently antithetical proposition that association not only fits the units into accommodation with each other, but that associa- tion is essentially assimilation of the individual life-process to