59 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
descriptive, objectively descriptive ; and then, as of greatest importance, it never exercises any one of these special functions without in corresponding degrees exercising both of the others. Undoubtedly, the fullest significance of this conception of lan- guage will be lost to those who forget, even in the face of evo- lution and of the schools for the blind and the mute, and of the supremacy of the natural sciences and laboratory methods in the curricula of our schools, that language and its mediation are coextensive with consciousness. All conscious creatures, low or high, are addicted to what is language essentially. Indeed there is, for modern science and this is to say also for modern life a universal language, namely, the common mediating envi- ronment of all living beings. Moreover, this common environ- ment, besides being or because being the universal language, is also the ultimate social contract, the ultimate embodiment of authority, the ultimate government ; and to it anyone who would understand the contract theory must give thoughtful attention.
In the years of the decline of Greek civilization, when indi- vidualism and an accompanying cosmopolitanism and naturalism were characteristic attitudes of the people, when there was both hidden and open treachery to the long-standing institutions, political and religious, of Greek life, the contract theory of society perhaps for the first time was enunciated, 1 and it must give value to the foregoing reference to language to remember that at the same time among the Greeks language had become, or was becoming, little better than a convention, a form with little or no substance, through which treacherous indi- viduals could keep up the conceit of a social relationship. How ingenious their statesmen, their politicians, were at verbal gym- nastics we know very well, and even puns were arguments with their professional philosophers, the Sophists. In time, too, the very names of the gods were not spared. What, then, more natural than that, as language, which is the most general medium of a social life, became thus formal and empty, a social contract
1 See PLATO'S Republic, II, 359 (JOWETT'S translations, third edition, Vol. Ill, p. 38 ; DAVIES AND VAUGHN'S translation, p. 41).
