Emory S. Bogardus

“ Life at times breaks over the bounds of pure heredity—the result is innovation. Variation, in the sense of mutation or innovation, appears to be due to the exuberance of life. At times nature appears to react against being bound by rigid laws of heredity, to defy her own rules, and to become rampant.
Social innovation is invention. New ideas often appear accidentally. The mind in its exuberance coins new phrases, catches new glimpses of reality, and creates ideas which are contrary to all that is established and supposedly true. ”

“ An individual does not become a god by wearing precious stones. The more the individual burdens himself with heavy stones and gorgeous apparel, the more insignificant he is.
Although in Utopia no man is wealthy, yet in a sense, all men are wealthy. All live joyfully, without worrying, and without fearing that they or their children will fall into poverty. Amaurote is a gigantic household, wherein the more able take a personal interest in the less able and in the unfortunate. No one lives in idleness and no one lives by virtue of any form of unnecessary economic enterprise. ”

“ The concept of universal peace was invented by the Hebrews. Isaiah and Micah share the honor of being the first persons to advocate world peace, and to predict the day when all nations shall worship a just God and thereby be enabled to beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning-hooks, when nation shall not stand against nation, and when the methods of warfare shall no longer be taught. The spirit of hatred and of blind, selfish antagonism shall pass away. ”

“ We deceive an animal, in order to catch and domesticate or kill him. We deceive a fellow human being and take his hard earned property away from him. Society, blindly, has praised deception even when used by one individual against the welfare of his fellows. ”

“ Even the ghosts of ancestors stalk the earth keeping guard over the folkways. The folkways carry with them the conviction that they are essential to human welfare. It is this conviction which gives them the force of mores. Thus the folkways are not purposeful methods of securing progress but unconscious ways of meeting current exigencies; they are blindly and rigorously forced upon successive generations. ”

“ Jesus taught a spiritual socialism. He thought in terms of spiritual love for all persons, not of material well-being for the proletariat. But he seemed to prefer the company of the poor. Blessed are the poor, was his attitude; for they are in a frame of mind which makes them fit subjects for the perfect Kingdom. The possession of property gives the individual a feeling of self-exaltation; poverty gives rise to humility—a cardinal virtue of the Kingdom. ”

“ The hearts of the people are the only legitimate foundations of an empire.
By nature all men are alike; but by education, widely different.
For the sake of one good action, a hundred evil ones should be forgotten. ”

“ Locke’s justification of revolution is his most startling doctrine. Imagine the heart-throb of the common people who heard Locke’s contention that the end of government is the good of mankind, that people should not submit to tyranny, that whoever uses his force without right and law puts himself in a state of war with those against whom he uses it, and that in such a state the people have a right to resist and defend themselves.XI-9 Further, the people have a right to act as the supreme social force and to put legislation into new forms and into the hands of new executives. ”

“ Inasmuch as Plato had turned away from an inviting though strenuous public career to a private life of scholarly thought, his perfect society assumed characteristics that were far from mundane. Because Plato lived in a day of small political groups and in a country of limited size, he limited his ideal society—to a group represented by 5040 heads of families. Consequently it is impossible to apply Plato’s social ideas with accuracy to a modern metropolitan center of 5,000,000 people, or to a nation-state of 100,000,000 people. ”

“ Theoretically, Aristotle believed that the best government would come through the absolute rulership of one man, provided that there is available a man pre-eminently wise and virtuous. But practically, Aristotle held that in choosing a form of government which will succeed, it is necessary to consider the actual social conditions, the state of development of the people, and the attitude of the ruler or rulers. It does not matter whether one person, or a few persons, or a large number of persons perform the function of ruler so long as the best interests of the state are kept uppermost. ”

“ Her own Influences of Geographic Environment has now become a standard work on the ways in which physical nature affects mankind.
Miss Semple, following but improving upon Ratzel, has shown in turn the influences of geographical location, area, and boundaries upon people. She indicates the various ways in which oceans, rivers, and coast lines have molded human minds; she distinguishes between mountain, steppe, and desert effects upon mankind. She describes man as a product of the earth’s surface. She stresses unduly the physical influences; she considers nature the dominating force. ”

“ For millenniums man has pondered hard over his relations and obligations to his God and to his universe, over the nature of his mind and spirit, over ways and means of acquiring individual success through a manipulation of the material resources of the earth. Incomprehensible as it may seem, it is true, however, that man has neglected almost wholly, until recently, the very heart of all successful living, namely, his relations and obligations to his fellow men and to society. Social thought, the center of all sound thinking, has been ignored. ”

“ Here and there, however, in human history we find individuals who have been freed or who have freed themselves from the daily struggle for a living, from the race to make money, or from the selfish enticements of life-long loafing, and have joined the world of scholars, seeking to know the truth, the truth which makes men and women free—free to develop useful personalities in a vast, changing complex of human living. When man, having leisure to think abstractly, has set himself to the task of thought research, his mind has ventured along at least five pathways. ”

“ Socrates spent many years at the market places, on the streets where people congregate and at the public resorts in studying the actions of individuals and in engaging them in conversation concerning their moral life. As a result Socrates evolved a significant social philosophy. The heart of this philosophy is found in the statements that virtue is knowledge, not in the sense of mere memorized facts but of a thorough understanding. If a person understands completely the good and evil phases of a proposed act, he will choose the right. ”

“ The Kingdom grows like a grain of mustard seed, which finally becomes a tree in whose branches the birds find homes.VIII-4 Love grows, and like leaven, permeates and transforms the whole mass,—the result is the perfect Kingdom.
God is the spiritual leader of the new society, to whom Jesus prayed in the social term, Our Father. God is the personification of love. God loved the sinful world so much that he gave his only son to the task of saving not simply the Jews or modern Europeans, but the whole world from all sins. ”

“ Where employers and employees have reached a common ground of co-operation, they have often joined forces in collusion against the public and the consumer. The employer agrees to a rise in wages for the employee, and the employee to an increase in dividends, providing he receives a portion of the added returns—meanwhile the public is apathetic or rages impotently. The best thought today is urging that on boards of directors and managers all three interested parties shall have representation, namely, labor, capital, and the public. ”

“ A law which makes theft a capital offense is harsher than even the harsh Mosaic law of an eye for an eye, a life for a life, because the former justifies the government in taking the life of an individual who is guilty of stealing money. In Utopia the thief is compelled to restore the stolen goods to the person from whom he stole, and not to the king, as in many lands in More’s time. The thief is put at common labor, not thrown into a city or county jail and left in idleness. ”

“ Jesus recognized woman as equal with man spiritually. His attitude toward his mother and the other women of his day was one of respect, chivalry, and gentleness. He laid the foundations of a social process in which women function on terms of equality with men.
Honor to parents and honor to wife must be supplanted by honor to children. Jesus worshiped little children. In them he saw the innocence and purity of God. When he wished to describe the attributes of the Kingdom, he selected a little child and held him up as typifying the simple, natural spirit of perfect living. ”

“ Democracy, however, must rid itself of blemishes. Hereditary and class privilege must be abolished;421 political corruption and race riots must be defeated; woman, “the original social builder, the mother of industry, the first inventor of the arts of peace,” must be granted a full voice in social control.
The ideal of education is exceedingly delicate, for it involves the process of the changing of ideals. Education may prepare a people to admire autocracy or to build a self-governing democracy. ”

“ Poverty provokes contempt. Class conflict results. The poor are ground low, murmur, and are again subjected to ignominy. Under such conditions democracy has a hard struggle. When physical conditions favor one class, that class will constitute itself the government and bitterly oppose the extension of government to all other classes. In Europe there was no cheap national food, no blind multiplication of population, and hence no such disparity between classes as in India. In Europe it has been easier for democratic movements to spread. ”

“ The United States is at the crossroads. One highway is characterized by luxury and extravagance on one side, and by poverty and slavery on the other; it leads to revolutionary attempts on the part of the masses to overthrow the privileged classes. It ends in national decadence. The second highway is characterized by justice. Those in economic authority are willing to grant representation to labor in the management of industry and to further the rise of the co-operative spirit. They are willing to sacrifice their own special privileges for the sake of the welfare of the disinherited. ”

“ Stoicism urged the Aristotelian social mean regarding property. Much property is a burden and a cause of worry and fear. It excites envy in others. The best society is that which is characterized by neither poverty nor plenty. The poor should not condemn riches, and the wealthy err in extolling the benefits of poverty—each is speaking of a situation which is objective to him and outside his sphere. Since it is objective to him, he is not qualified to speak concerning it. The individual is a great man who is not corrupted by his wealth ”

“ Anarchism. The remedy for over-organization is not anarchy, for life and society are composed of numbers of conflicting tendencies, which must be controlled by the power of thought. But the exercise of merely individual thought will not suffice. Individual thought is likely to be egocentric, to evade the problems of group life, or to solve them selfishly. (5) Conservatism. An established and successful civilization is in danger of relying too much on its past. It often carries within itself the canker of decay, and frequently lacks any clear vision of higher development. ”

“ The acquisition of knowledge is no guarantee that instincts centuries old will be promptly overcome or re-directed.
Furthermore, with a young child the instinctive tendencies begin to assert themselves and to give direction to the growth of the character of the child, long before his mentality has unfolded and developed to the point where he is capable of genuinely understanding the real meaning of many forms of activity, and where many phases of knowledge are entirely beyond his ability to comprehend. ”

“ Jesus hated sin. To him, sin was anything which overcomes love and which causes the individual or society to disintegrate. Sin is that which defeats or hinders the coming of the Kingdom of Love. Sin breaks up or holds back the social process. Sin, like love, is organic. Sin grows. An evil tree brings forth evil fruit ”

“ They were utterly unable to understand how any persons with the slightest spark of human nature in them could endure to live to themselves in wealth when in the same city there were the wretched and prostrated multitudes of Whitechapel and the other cheerless slums. ”

“ Bellamy presents a plan of industrial organization on a national scale with individuals sharing equally in the products of labor, or in public income, in the same way that “men share equally in the free gifts of nature.” Bellamy protests against an economic order whose chief evil is summed up in the following question: How can men be free who must ask the right to labor and to live from their fellows, and seek their bread from the hand of others?
Society is likened to a gigantic coach to which the masses of humanity are harnessed, toiling along a very hilly and sandy road. ”

“ Social service is not a selfish program, on the part of the church, for increasing its membership. It is as natural to Christianity as personal evangelism, and equally intrinsic and vital. It has won more than national recognition. While it is radical in the eyes of the conservative, it contains an analysis of social conditions that many of its critics have not appreciated. It breathes a sincerity and a straightforwardness that compels the fair-minded reader to give heed.
Slavery was rejected as the economic basis of civilization, and monarchy has recently been rejected as the political basis. ”

“ It may be said here that both heredity and environment are more or less equally essential in the development of human personality. Without inherited factors in the individual the environment has nothing upon which to work. Without a stimulating environment the inherited traits will remain dormant. Each human being has inherited factors which, if played upon by certain environmental factors, may lead the individual to try to wreck society or himself or both. ”