tions man preserves individual experience and aggregates it into wisdom. From this store of wisdom is fed the individual again, so that the particular man contributes to society his mite and receives back the total result of the experience of his entire race, a gift so great that it reminds us of the doctrine of Grace, one of the profoundest mysteries of the Christian religion, wherein is stated the spiritual fact that the gift whereby man is saved is a free gift of God, and altogether out of proportion to the merit or works of the repenting individual, who gives up his will and the products of his will to the service of the Lord. He gives up a particular product and receives back a universal. In this comprehensive sense society is a symbol of the work of Grace. The individual man is, at the beginning, a child or a savage, a mere animal. He is to be lifted up into spiritual combination with the race. Society, that elevates him, finds him at first totally depraved in this regard. He has no idea or impulse to receive culture at the hands of society. As an animal, he has impulses and appetites which he feels far more vividly than he does moral and rational principles.

But he must learn to subordinate these impulses and appetites to the rules or laws which society prescribe as the condition of social existence. Mere animal selfishness must give way to the dedication of one's self to others. The natural self must be abdicated in order that the personal self may be realized. And this personal self is the rational self, the self that lives through participation with mankind, receiving the largess of humanity in all its shapes. On its lowest plane -that of the material- the individual man gets back the right to enjoy the fruits of all climes, to partake in the food, clothing, and shelter collected in every market by the concerted effort of all civilized and half-civilized energies. The agriculture, manufactures, commerce, and intercommunication organized as institutions, wherein each man combines with his fellow and produces an aggregate result so vast, are only one province of realized reason.

It is true that in that province, partial as it is, and the lowest form of human combination, the individual receives back a blessing of incalculable extent. He gives only the products of his own labor. He raises a small crop, or cobbles a few shoes, or distributes as a merchant a few commodities, or carries to and from market a few loads of productions; or, as a laborer in the field of the diffusion of intelligence (intercommunication), he edits, prints, or sells a newspaper or book; at best his labor is a small affair compared with the aggregate labor of mankind, and his contribution thereto is a widow's mite, and yet for this he receives in return the necessaries of life; his natural wants are supplied from the inexhaustible reservoir of human industry, a thence-flowing rivulet, bringing him his daily bread, his clothing, his shelter. What is the difference between his taking food, clothing, and shelter thus at the hand of society, and his taking it as a savage directly from nature? Here is the vast difference that separates man as an animal from man as a spirit. As a mere individual, an utter savage, he recognizes in his deed no other human being; he manifests only the properties of matter — exclusiveness and appropriation. Material things exclude, and do not participate; if one thing combines with another, it does this by the destruction of the individuality of the other, and commonly of both things. There is no preservation of individuality in nature except through exclusiveness, and this is destruction of other individuality, and finally of its own. Spirit, on the other hand, is inclusiveness, the preservation of individuality by the elevation of it into personality; each voluntarily yields its individuality to the whole, to society,—and gets back personality as its dower. Each is for all, and all is for each. Material things are negative. Spiritual things are positive. The individual as a natural being is exclusive, — selfish, — negative to human combination; as regenerated into a person, he is self-sacrificing, accepts the supply to his wants as a gift from the

social whole. The man who, in society, isolates himself, and produces nothing to contribute to the general store, is not allowed to draw anything thence, he cannot pay for it. If he pays for his stipend he symbolizes his devotion to society and his sacrifice of his labor for the whole, and having performed this symbolic ceremony he can receive from the general store. If he is a beggar or an object of charity, in the very act of receiving alms, he sacrifices all of his natural individuality and confesses his utter dependence on the social whole. It must not be overlooked that when an individual buys something, what he pays for it is only a symbol, and not a real quid pro quo, that is to say, unless he pays in money, which itself is the commodity that has received the stamp of universality, and is not the direct product of the labor of a special individual. The countryman brings to market a basket of corn, and receives therefor a paper of coffee or tea. Perhaps his individual labor alone has planted, and harvested, and marketed the corn. But the coffee or tea has required the agency of an army of men, passing through the hands of the agricul turalists, the small and large traders, the transportation companies, and the government officials, in its process of development and transit from its distant home in Brazil, or Arabia, or China, to the market in Missouri. The alchemy which makes possible the exchange of an individual product that has not received the care of many individuals, with the product that has received the care, not only of many individuals, but of national governments; what renders all possible is spiritual combination, not a natural, but a spiritual principle, not material exclusiveness, but human participation through self-sacrifice.

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The scientific method which devotes itself to the history of a process of nature finds completely realized existences for its investigation. But in the realm of human nature it finds only partially realized existences. The institutions of human society contain an ideal which they have never been

able to realize. They are, therefore, not to be comprehended fully by their history.

The history of the oak explains the oak, but the history of a human institution,- say the family, or the State,- does not explain fully its latest growths. Through all civil history, perhaps, one can find a principle of progress, but it is no complete cycle, like the process of the seasons or the life of the plant. Instead of interpreting the present by the past, we interpret both the present and the past by the future, by the ideal of freedom and realized reason towards which human history approaches as a goal. In social science we deal with an object whose beginning is here, but whose end is in eternity. Each and every institution of man exists for the sake of his freedom, or in order that he may become a self-knowing and self-realizing being.

From the fact that all merely natural beings — whether mineral, plant, or animal-never rise to the form of selfknowing and self-realizing, it follows that the application of scientific method to the explanation of human institutions in the ordinary form, is not valid. In nature we explain the present by the past. If we attempt to explain the institutions of the family, society, and the State by the rudimentary forms found in the childhood of the race, or, still worse, by the habits of the higher animals,-as the ape tribe, for example, we shall invert the true method for social science. Since all of man's institutions arise as forms of combination which he has made in order to realize an ideal, it follows that the first ones, historically, are so rudimentary as scarcely to indicate their object, while the later and latest ones contain the explanation of themselves and of their predecessors.

For the study of society, then, one must seek his principle of explanation, not in the child or the savage, but in the ideals of the prophets of humanity. We are to understand Greek life through a study of Homer and

Plato; the Middle Ages through Dante and Thomas Aquinas; modern times, through Shakespeare and Goethe.

Above all, we must not make the mistake of studying man as a simple individual. As a particular individual, he is only an animal; but as an individual who is always engaged in realizing in himself the whole species, he is a spiritual being.

The great fundamental truth which has come out as the net result of social science is that of the serial nature of man's self. He is not simply a single self as individual, nor is his race a vast number of individual selves. But as individual he is one self, and then he exists in a series of selves ascending above him, each one a higher revelation of the nature of his self, a more complete realization of his ideal self.

There is, for example, besides the individual, the first self above him in the shape of the family to which he belongs. He is a member of this higher self, and also, at the same time, one of its conscious centres. For in these higher selves the individual is not only a part, but he is at the same time the whole, the inspiring soul. This, indeed, to some extent, is true of the humblest individual in society. Above the family there is the larger self of the social community in which the individual lives. It is an industrial and civil unit. In this unit he is still more strikingly a subordinate member, a coöperating link; and besides this, a more complete individual, a more perfect, selfdetermining being.

In the State, in the Church, the individual finds new selves. To know one's self, then, means to know society; to know not only the particular individual self which I am, but my universal self, realized above me in a series of vast, colossal forms.

To rise into higher selves, and to know himself in these higher selves, is doubtless the destination of man.