Charles Horton Cooley

“ Thus the appeal of Christianity to the human mind may be said to have rested, in all periods, partly on the symbolic power of a personality—so idealized and interpreted as to be in effect a system as well as a man—and partly on a changing but always elaborate structure of doctrines, ritual, polity, preaching and the like. Take away these symbols and there is nothing distinctive left. And if the whole is to go on, the system of symbols, again renewed, must go on, too. No more in religion than in any other phase of life can we have an inside without an outside, essence without form. ”

“ Will not the intense preoccupation with material production, the hurry and strain of our cities, the draining of life into one channel, at the expense of breadth, richness, and beauty, appear as mad as the crusades, and perhaps of a lower type of madness? Could anything be more indicative of a slight but general insanity than the aspect of the crowd on the streets of Chicago?
An illustration of this unconsciousness of what is distinctive in our time is the fact that those who participate in momentous changes have seldom any but the vaguest notion of their significance. ”

“ Our material betterment is a great thing, and our comparative freedom a greater, but these rather increase than diminish the need of a higher discipline in the mind that is to use them profitably: the more opportunities the more problems. Social betterment is like the advance of science in that each achievement opens up new requirements. There is no prospect that the world will ever satisfy us, and the structure of life is forever incomplete without something to satisfy the need of the spirit for ideas and sentiments that transcend and reconcile all particular aims whatsoever. ”

“ So if one, turning the leaves of history, could evoke the real selves of all the men of thought, what a strange procession they would be!—outlandish theories, unintelligible and forgotten creeds, hypotheses once despised but now long established, or vice versa—all conceived eagerly, jealously, devotedly, as the very heart of the self. There is no class more sensitive and none, not even the insane, in whom self-feeling attaches to such singular and remote conceptions. ”

“ Haste and the superficiality and strain which attend upon it are widely and insidiously destructive of good work in our day. No other condition of mind or of society—not ignorance, poverty, oppression or hate—kills art as haste does. Almost any phase of life may be ennobled if there is only calm enough in which the brooding mind may do its perfect work upon it; but out of hurry nothing noble ever did or can emerge. In art human nature should come to a total, adequate expression; a spiritual tendency should be perfected and recorded in calmness and joy. ”

“ When I feel sorry for a man in disgrace, it is, no doubt, in most cases, because I have imaginatively partaken of his humiliation; but my compassion for him is not the thing that is shared, but is something additional, a comment on the shared feeling. I may imagine how a suffering man feels—sympathize with him in that sense—and be moved not to pity but to disgust, contempt, or perhaps admiration. ”

“ And as an ally of established power we have to reckon with the inertia of social structure, something so massive and profound that the loudest agitation is no more than a breeze ruffling the surface of deep waters. Dominated by the habits which it has generated, we all of us, even the agitators, uphold the existing order without knowing it. There may, of course, be sudden changes due to the fall of what has long been rotten, but I see little cause to suppose that the timbers of our system are in this condition: they are rough and unlovely, but far from weak. ”

“ To have a conspicuously individual way of doing everything is impossible to a sane person, and to attempt it would be to do one’s self a gratuitous injury, by closing the channels of sympathy through which we partake of the life around us. We should save our strength for matters in regard to which persistent conviction impels us to insist upon our own way.
Society, like every living, advancing whole, requires a just union of stability and change, uniformity and differentiation. Conformity is the phase of stability and uniformity, while non-conformity is the phase of differentiation and change. ”

“ A deeper sense of a common life, both as incarnated in the men about us and as inferred in some larger whole behind and above them—in God—belongs to the higher spirit of democracy as it does to the teaching of Jesus.
He calls the mind out of the narrow and transient self of sensual appetites and visible appurtenances, which all of us in our awakened moments feel to be inferior, and fills it with the incorrupt good of higher sentiment. We are to love men as brothers, to fix our attention upon the best that is in them, and to make their good our own ambition. ”

“ Thus a boy gloats over something he has made with his scroll-saw, over the bird he has brought down with his gun, or over his collection of stamps or eggs; a girl gloats over her new clothes, and over the approving words or looks of others; a farmer over his fields and his stock; a business man over his trade and his bank account; a mother over her child; the poet over a successful quatrain; the self-righteous man over the state of his soul; and in like manner everyone gloats over the prosperity of any cherished idea. ”

“ For better or for worse, concentration is probably inevitable in any society that has a vast, mobile wealth subject to competition; and the actual inequality is perhaps not much greater than that of political power, which is supposed to be equally distributed by general suffrage. The truth is that equality of power or influence, in any sphere of life, is inconsistent with the free working of human forces, which is ever creating differences, some of which are useful to society and some harmful. A true freedom, a reasonable equality, aims to conserve the former and abolish or limit the latter. ”

“ It has often been remarked that to one in love the beloved person appears as a mystery, enveloped, as it were, in a sort of purple cloud. This is doubtless because the lover is undergoing strange alteration in his own mind; fresh vague passions are rising into consciousness out of the dark storehouse of hereditary instinct; he is cast loose from his old anchorage and does not know whither he is driven. The consequent feeling of a power and a strangeness upon him he associates, of course, with the person—commonplace enough, perhaps, to others—who is the symbol and occasion of the experience. ”

“ The most notable reaction of democracy upon religious sentiment is no doubt a tendency to secularize it, to fix it upon human life rather than upon a vague other world. So soon as men come to feel that society is not a machine, controlled chiefly by the powers of darkness, but an expression of human nature, capable of reflecting whatever good human nature can rise to; so soon, that is, as there comes to be a public will, the religious spirit is drawn into social idealism. Why dream of a world to come when there is hopeful activity in this? ”

“ The contrast between our attitudes toward crime and toward insanity is primarily a matter of personal idea and impulse. We understand the criminal act, or think we do, and we feel toward it resentment, or hostile sympathy; while we do not understand the insane act, and so do not resent it, but regard it with pity, curiosity, or disgust. If one man strikes down another to rob him, or in revenge, we can imagine the offender’s state of mind, his motive lives in our thought and is condemned by conscience precisely as if we thought of doing the act ourselves. ”

“ How soothing and elevating it is to breathe the atmosphere of some large and quiet discipline. I remember feeling this in reading Lord Roberts’ Forty-one Years in India, a book pervaded with one great and simple thought, the Anglo-Indian service, which dominates all narrow considerations and gives people a worthy ideal to live by. How rarely, in our day, is a book or a man dominated by restful and unquestioned faith in anything! ”

“ Indeed, to know where and how to narrow the activity of the will in order to preserve its tone and vigor for its most essential functions, is a great part of knowing how to live. An incontinent exercise of choice wears people out, so that many break down and yield even essentials to discipline and authority in some form; while many more wish, at times, to do so and indulge themselves, perhaps, in Thomas à Kempis, or “The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life.” Not a few so far exhaust the power of self-direction as to be left drifting at the mercy of undisciplined passions. ”

“ In so far as one identifies himself with a whole, loyalty to that whole is loyalty to himself; it is self-realization, something in which one cannot fail without losing self-respect. Moreover this is a larger self, leading out into a wider and richer life, and appealing, therefore, to enthusiasm and the need of quickening ideals. One is never more human, and as a rule never happier, than when he is sacrificing his narrow and merely private interest to the higher call of the congenial group. And without doubt the natural genesis of this sentiment is in the intimacy of face-to-face coöperation. ”

“ A child born in a slum, brought up in a demoralized family, and put at some confining and mentally deadening work when ten or twelve years old, is no more free to be healthy, wise, and moral than a Chinese child is free to read Shakespeare. Every social ill involves the enslavement of individuals.
This idea of freedom is quite in accord with a general, though vague, sentiment among us; it is an idea of fair play, of giving everyone a chance; and nothing arouses more general and active indignation among our people than the belief that someone or some class is not getting a fair chance. ”

“ Perhaps the most searching test of solidarity is that loyalty of the individual to the whole which ensures that, however isolated, as a soldier, a pioneer, a mechanic, a student, he will cherish that whole in his heart and do his duty to it in contempt of terror or bribes. And it is precisely in this that the Anglo-Saxon peoples are strong. The Englishman, though alone in the wilds of Africa, is seldom other than an Englishman, setting his conscience by English standards and making them good in action. ”

“ But a credible creed is an excellent thing, and the lack of it is a real moral deficiency.
Now in times of intellectual unsettlement, like the present, the ideal may become disorganized and scattered, the face of God blurred to the view, like the reflection of the sun in troubled waters. And at the same time the creeds become incredible, so that, until new ones can be worked out and diffused, each man must either make one for himself—a task to which few are equal—or undergo distraction, or cease to think about such matters, if he can. ”

“ It is indeed probable that the growth of class fellowship will help to foster that spirit of art in work which we so notably lack, and the repose and content which this brings. There is truth in the view that a confused and standardless competition destroys art, which requires not only a group ideal but a certain deliberation, a chance to brood over things and work perfection into them. When the workman is more sure of his position, when he feels his fellows at his shoulder and knows that the quality of his work will be appreciated, he will have more courage and patience to be an artist. ”

“ There is no better phenomenon in which to observe personal ascendency than public speaking. When a man takes the floor in an assembly, all eyes are fixed upon him, all imaginations set to work to divine his personality and significance. If he looks like a true and steadfast man, of a spirit kindred with our own, we incline to him before he speaks, and believe that what he says will be congenial and right. ”