FORMULAE OF SOCIAL PROGRESS 197 
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: “ (1) 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 
1 Social and Ethical Interpretations, p. 512. 
