FORMULAE OF SOCIAL PROGRESS I97 



lessons in personal (now social) growth in the new achievements 

 of individuals. If we take any lesson which society learns, — 

 any one thought which it adopts and makes a part of its organized 

 content, — we can trace the passage of this thought or element 

 through the two poles of the ' dialectic of social growth ' just as 

 we can also trace the elements of personal suggestion, in the case 

 of the analogous dialectic of the individual's growth. The new 

 thought is * projective ' to society as long as it exists in the 

 individual's mind only; it becomes ' subjective ' to society 

 when society has generalized it and embodied it in some one of 

 the institutions which are a part of her intimate organization; 

 and then finally society makes it ^ ejective ' by requiring, by all 

 her pedagogical, civil, and other sanctions, that each individual, 

 class, or subordinate group which claims a share in her corporate 

 life, shall recognize it and live up to it. 



" Society, in other words, makes her particularizations, inven- 

 tions, interpretations, through the individual man, just as the 

 individual makes his through the alter individual who gives him 

 his suggestions; and then society makes her generalizations by 

 setting the results thus reached to work again for herself in the 

 form of institutions, etc., just as the individual sets out for social 

 confirmation and for conduct the interpretations which he has 

 reached. The growth of society is therefore a growth in a sort of 

 self-consciousness, — an awareness of itself, — expressed in the 

 general ways of thought, action, etc., embodied in its institutions; 

 and the individual gets his growth in self-consciousness in a way 

 which shows by a sort of recapitulation this two-fold movement 

 of society. So the method of growth in the two cases, — what 

 has been called the ' dialectic,' — is the same." ^ 



The relation between society and the individual is well ex- 

 pressed in these words: " (i) Individuals can particularize only 

 on the basis of earlier generalizations of society. This gives an 

 initial trend to the thought-variations which are available for 

 social use. (2) Society is absolutely dependent, as to its new 

 acquisitions, upon the new thoughts, particularizations, of 

 individuals; and it again generalizes them. It can get material 



* Social and Ethical Interpretations, p. 512. 



