SOCIAL CONTROL
559
century, or the Japan of today, the conserving forces of society conspire to whet this sentiment to the utmost keenness. In explaining why the moral solidarity of a society is now and then broken by a brief orgie of the natural man, it is necessary to observe that there is no fixed cycle of changes through which a system of social control normally passes. A phase of control is determined, not by the previous phase, but by social facts of a more primary order. Law and morality have no career of their own, but yield at every moment to the shaping pressure of o her forces in social life.
If undisturbed, a people builds the knowledges, ideas, and experiences in its possession into a "world-view" which agrees with and supports its social control. They are brought into har- mony with those ideas about the other world, about the ends of life, about the worth of things, and about the honorableness and dishonorableness of actions which society drills into its members. In other words, the form of culture, which is a tri- fling affair, is subdued to the purposes of regulation, which is a very important affair. Now anything that shatters this rigid confining crust that forms upon a society weakens all that con- trol which does not depend on direct agencies like force, public opinion, etc., and thereby ushers in an era of individualism.
The accumulation of new knowledge does this. In Greece at her prime the rapid gains in a scientific apprehension of things undermined the old religious and moral views and brought on a moral crisis. Similarly, modern science has destroyed the theo- logical systems which subordinated knowledge to regulative ideas, and has fostered among the enlightened classes of today an extraordinary freedom of spirit. This, be it remarked, is an emancipation of wholly different origin from that which has resulted from the economic conditions of the New World. Let one but compare the individualism which the free exercise of the reason has generated in the cultivated part of European society with that which has always characterized the Americans of our frontier.
The borrowing of new knowledge has the same effect as the rapid accumulation of it. That direct taking over of the
