forced to learn as children learn. I recall at this moment being away where there was a professor in Brown University, a friend of mine, a professor of Greek I wont say how many years ago, because you might recognize himwho was consul at Athens. I called to see him, and he was out. There came

to the door a young girl who talked nothing but what they called Greek, and I was nonplused. I thought I knew something of Greek; I had been taught it in college; but it was all "Greek" to me. A little girl, the consul's child, very young, able to speak only certain phrases, came toddling along and asked me in a childish way what I wanted, and I spoke to her in English. I told her I wanted to see so and so, and she turned to the girl and spoke to her in Greekhad quite a lengthy conversation in Greek; and then she came back to me and translated what she said. I spoke to the father later, and he said: "I have been a student of Greek all my life, and this child has been a few months in this country, and she is able to talk Greek and translate it to me." This means there is a method of learning which the child gets which by the college process we do not get.

Speaking of Greek, I remember that I was a very bad Greek scholar; my degree coming very near suffering for it; and when I was called on not very long after to put on a Greek play at Vassar, in getting at the sentiment, the modes, and characterization of that play, I found, when I faced the cast for the first time, that I was prompting them in Greek, that I was speaking to them in Greek words, using Greek explanations; that the language to me was a live thing which I understood for the first time; and I never had understood it during the four years when I was in college.

Now, there are ways of learning, and the actor has those ways, and I believe other artists find those ways; and I only wish there could be founded for this work of the theater a dramatic science as well as a dramatic art.

I am afraid I am running over the time. I want to say only a very few words more. It seems to me that the greatest study, the greatest book of all, is the book of life; and that is so much ignored. I believe that a great deal of the so-called scholarship is a mistake. It has no living value to us; we cannot use it, and it never ought to be taken up unless it has a valuation-practical use in our lives that we can put it to. The actor learns and the artist learns to study from life, to go out and study life, to study the character-all the faculties of human nature, all their manifestations, and so on; he learns a great deal more, and a great deal more quickly, than by the so-called academic method. I believe that literature should be and can be taught in that way. There again I am out of my field. But I cannot see why literature and all that is taught in rhetoric and grammar cannot be acquired through life-study in the theater. There is a peculiar thing which is not recognized. We know very well that there has been a revolution from the old mediaeval style to the development of the individual power, in studying individual temperament and character. In the theater a great Ideal that is causing some of the prejudice, and statements that have been made in regard to the drama today, can be answered by this peculiar fact: we have passed through, or we have partially passed through, a period, but we have hardly outgrown the mediaeval period. All remember, not many years ago, when the so-called stock companies were purely labor guilds, and when the whole process

of production and plan of workmanship were by pure authority, not by the study of the individual needs or abilities. That exists today to a certain extent, and is partly the cause of any weakness that may exist in our work. But, on the other hand, we are passing now rapidly out of that, and realizing that it is the development of the individual that is the great thing in the stage as well as in every other thing. And there is such a thing as education in the theater and for the actor. The ideal drama, of course, is in a very mixed state. We have all styles: we have the old-school actor brought up in the old mediaeval way; we have the modern actor brought up in an original way; and we have all styles mixed up in every way that we see. We don't know what it is that annoys us, but it is probable they are like a mixture of colors that do not harmonize.

I think this poor thing which is generally spoken of in that way, the poor child called the drama, cannot be treated in the old-fashioned way by spanking, by being sent into the corner as a poor, miserable thing that has to exist, but will have the honor of the attention and thought of your learned scientists.

PROFESSOR CHARLES H. MOORE, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

I have had no opportunity to read Mrs. Unger's paper in advance of this meeting. Moreover, your secretary invited me to present, if I saw fit, a separate and independent paper upon the general topic of this session; and this is what I have prepared to do. In the following remarks I have in mind the arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting primarily; but the case is with them the same as with music and the drama-which have just been more particularly considered.

Whether the fine arts have any power for good must depend on the spirit in which they are practiced, and the ideals they embody. The fine arts are mainly addressed to the feelings and the imagination. Their primary function is not to teach, but to give pleasure, and the kind of pleasure they may give will correspond with the motives by which they are inspired, and the feelings with which they are regarded. It follows that the influence of the fine arts may be evil as well as good, and thus whether they tend to advance or to retard the well-being of society will depend on their quality.

But the fine arts are not so much a moving force as a result of moving forces, since they are necessarily the expression of the moral and spiritual conditions under which they are produced. Therefore it is with these conditions that we need to concern ourselves primarily. Where people have artistic aptitudes, have reached a high plane of moral, intellectual, and civil life, and keep their higher interests dominant, they naturally produce noble art. Where such conditions are wanting noble art is impossible, and such arts as may be produced will have no good effect. The important question is, then, not so much how to utilize the fine arts, as how to make possible their existence in their best forms, and how to bring about in society capacity for their enjoyment— how to make people responsive to the appeal of noble art. The utility of the fine arts will take care of itself under right conditions.

With all that is admirable in our civilization, we yet appear to be far from realizing such conditions, and we shall not accomplish much for the good of society through the agency of art until we shall have laid a better foundation.

We are going too fast in attempts to popularize the fine arts for the benefit of society. We are in danger of encouraging the acceptance of specious and spurious art instead of that which is genuine. Our present activity in lecturing, in the placing of works of art in schools, in the multiplication of schools of design and museums of art, is largely ineffectual for good because it lacks discrimination, and overlooks the need for preliminary efforts to prepare the way for right artistic feeling. This activity does not enough regard the motives by which the arts are inspired. It proceeds too much on the notion that any kind of artistic interest will be salutary.

I believe that only good art can be of use to society, and good art is that which is inspired by wholesome conditions and high ideals. Therefore, as I have said, the way to make the fine arts useful to society is first to bring about conditions out of which good art can come. In advance of this all efforts to encourage and to popularize the arts will be futile as to results in the popular well-being. In advance of this the people cannot know what good art is. The present bewildering confusion of thought as to what is best in art is due primarily to the fact that this principle is not enough recognized and made the basis of judgment. It will be well, then, briefly to consider by what means it may be possible to do something to bring about the requisite conditions.

Without enlarging on obvious truisms as to the primary necessity for right motives, and right conduct of life, as the only basis of human action, and the only means of opening the mind to good influences of any kind, I may say that in my opinion one of the first steps toward better conditions must consist in the inculcation of a keener sense of public and private seemliness in our surroundings. So long as the approaches to our cities and towns are made unsightly by the dumping of refuse, by squalid settlements, and by a slatternly condition of grounds about manufacturing establishments; so long as offensive advertisements are flaunted from the walls of houses, and along entire lines of railways; and so long as streets are lined with pretentious buildings in jangling discord of numberless irrational travesties of architectural design, there can be little hope for much popular appreciation of the meaning and the worth of beauty, or for sterling artistic production. The state of mind which makes these things possible is incompatible with that to which noble art appeals. Eyes habituated to such sights, and feelings blunted by indifference to their deformity, must be incapable of responding to the influences of good art. Few of us escape the deadening influence of the appalling sights that thus disgrace our civilization.

A second step toward the creation of better conditions should consist, I think, in the cultivation of the sense of beauty by observation of the beauty of nature, and of good works of art where such works are accessible. The discrimination necessary to distinguish what is best will come through observation and comparison, if we study in a right spirit; for, though the best in art and in nature assumes a great variety of forms, it is one in essential character, and that character becomes discernible through the habitual effort to distinguish between good and bad.

Nothing conduces so effectively to this culture as the practice of drawing, if it be steadily directed to this end. I would therefore make drawing, not for its utility for mechanical or industrial ends, or with a view to any kind of artistic production, but as an aid to the apprehension of beauty, a very consider

able part of the school training of youth. And I think we ought to regard any school programme as seriously defective which does not include this most humanizing exercise.

A further prerequisite for conditions favorable to the existence of art from which salutary influence can proceed is a constant and unqualified aspiration for excellence. All good art is based on good craftsmanship in best materials-on fitness for use and endurance in architecture, and on best possible carving, and drawing and painting, in the plastic and graphic arts. Without such conditions it is impossible for a people to produce any fine art worthy of the name, and only in so far as they can be made to prevail will it be possible for the best art to have any salutary social influence. Mere contact with even the noblest art counts for little where a people's engrossing interests lie in other directions, as is abundantly shown at the present time in those European countries which have the richest inheritance in noble works of art.

The great obstacle to a general prevalence of the finer influences of art among us, and the chief cause of popular indifference to the unsightliness of our surroundings, lie in our excessive material ambitions and activities. People always succeed best in those things for which they care most. If we consider what the great American people at present care most for, we shall hardly find that it is for those things which make for an appreciation of the worth of beauty. It is very clear, on every hand, that mechanical, commercial, and even scientific ends, with a primary view to material profit, and material comfort and convenience, are what now mainly animate our activities to a degree that is incompatible with openness to the finer influences of beauty. Whatever aspirations for better things there may be are, with the great majority of people, so subordinated to these material interests that they have no appreciable effect on the prevailing trend of thought and feeling.

The aspect of every thriving American city affords abundant confirmation of this. Consider, for instance, the appalling aspect of the city of New York at the present moment, as one views it in passing through the East River. Yet New York is our chief artistic center. She has her great Central Park, she spends many millions of dollars on ornate public and private buildings, she has a great Museum of the Fine Arts, and contributes largely to the support of music and the drama. But for how little good do these things count in the general make-up of the metropolis-which as a whole is hideous beyond any power of words to describe! There never was before in the world a great city of such appalling aspect.

I would not draw an exaggerated picture, and I take no pessimistic view. I believe that things are coming out right in the end. Nor would I imply that no signs of better things are discernible, that no excellence of achievement is manifest in contemporaneous art, or that no good influence now goes forth from this art. Much less would I deny that fine aptitudes for artistic enjoyment and artistic production are latent in the modern world and in the American people. But I would call attention to the fact that artistic aspirations, artistic ability, and the good influences on society which they should exert, are heavily handicapped by present conditions. And it is this state of things, it seems to me, that should deeply concern the American Sociological Society, and every modern ccmmunity.

SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS

PROFESSOR CHARLES H. COOLEY

University of Michigan

SOCIAL MIND IN GENERAL

Mind is an organic whole made up of co-operating individualities, in somewhat the same way that the music of an orchestra is made up of divergent but related sounds. No one would think it necessary or reasonable to divide the music into two kindsthat made by the whole and that of particular instruments; and no more are there two kinds of mind-the social mind and the individual mind. When we study the social mind, we merely fix our attention on larger aspects and relations, rather than on the narrower ones of ordinary psychology.

The view that all mind hangs together in a vital whole, from which the individual is never really separate, flows naturally from our growing knowledge of heredity and suggestion, which makes it increasingly clear that every thought we have is linked with the thought of our ancestors and associates, and through them with that of society at large. It is also the only view consistent with the general standpoint of modern science, which admits nothing isolate in nature.

The unity of the social mind consists, not in agreement, but in organization, in the fact of reciprocal influence or causation among its parts, by virtue of which everything that takes place in it is connected with everything else, and so is an outcome of the whole. Whether, like the orchestra, it gives forth harmony may be a matter of dispute, but that its sound, pleasing or otherwise, is the expression of a vital co-operation, cannot well be denied.

SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL ASPECTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

In the social mind we may distinguish-very roughly, of course-conscious and unconscious relations. The unconscious are those of which we are not aware; which, in one way or