Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/612

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598 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

something of a paradox, and politically it is likely to seem even an untruth ; but that such coextension is a condition, and at least a half-confessed practice as well as a theory of our time, can be shown in many ways. Thus the importance of travel and com- munication to modern life indicates that the nations are using each other's resources and even living within each other's bor- ders. Commercial and industrial exchange is further evidence ; and division of labor, also, so closely involved in these. And the familiar fact that no nation nowadays really thinks of its history as beginning with the time of its formal incorporation speaks volumes for the unity of man's political experience. The terri- tory of all nations is one territory. The history of all nations is one history. This coextension, however, of histories and territories must not be understood to mean that under the organic theory a nation is not to be limited to certain geograph- ical boundaries and in its activity to be included within a certain period of time, but since the very geographical and historical limitations imply relation, not isolation this instead. Mere possession of territory, whatever the bounds or mere existence through time, however long the interval, is no justification of nationality. To get and to hold territory is not to become or remain a nation. Such would, indeed, be the case, were the state really an imposition, whether through a creative compact or through any supernatural agency; but, the state being rooted in nature, territorial and historical individuality cannot but mean unity with all that is without, that is to say, vital participation in the acquired property and the historical experience of all peoples, and only as such unity is recognized and served is an individual nation justified. Under the organic theory resources secured through possession must be used, not merely held, and used consistently with the life and experience of all. Failure in such use justifies war and even conquest.

So much, then, for the individualism and organism, the

on the infinitesimal, which is a negation of quantity, really means nothing else ; and the rise of the calculus contemporaneously with that of the contract theory, or, as the same thing, of constitutionalism and internationalism, was no mere accident. Even the history of mathematics is alive ; in it one can find the history of civilization, if one will but look.