COHESIVE POWER OF SOCIAL LIFE 269 



nitely uniting and regulating the supplies and demands 

 of a world-wide social life. 



Within that period, its roads and pathways grew 

 from provincial, or national ones, to oceanic and con- 

 tinental highways, rightly oriented to terrestrial archi- 

 tecture and human service. The stored-up energy of a 

 nature-life, long since extinct, became its chief source 

 of power. Primeval vehicles of vital commodities 

 grew to steel-clad ships and cars, swift couriers of age- 

 long hostile peoples and their products. The feeble 

 signals of cell to cell and man to man, calling for aid 

 and offering aid, grew to the call of empires and con- 

 tinents flashed around the world in advertisement of 

 their surplus and their necessities; and accepting these 

 invitations to exchange, protoplasmic, cultural, and in- 

 ternational metabolism were joined in one. 



In approximately this brief period, many house- 

 hold functions grew into municipal and state functions; 

 and domestic architecture into municipal and state ar- 

 chitecture; into reservoirs, parks, conservatories, gran- 

 aries, and warehouses, and into communal heating, 

 lighting, cooking, cold storage, and sewerage systems. 

 The unstable mental records of countless individuals 

 were fixed, summed up, tabulated and recorded in ma- 

 terial symbols; memorialized in ledgers of metal and 

 stone; in libraries and museums; in science, literature, 

 and art, the great communal banks for the conservation 

 of human profits, world reservoirs of spiritual power, 

 subject to draught at all times, by all peoples. 



All these great cultural systems, which came to 

 life with such extraordinary rapidity in the nineteenth 

 century, are for social life precisely what the living, or- 



