Social condition

“ Whatever proofs we may have of the social disposition of man in familiar and contiguous scenes, it is possibly of importance, to draw our observations from the examples of men who live in the simplest condition, and who have not learned to affect what they do not actually feel. ”

“ Here a word must be said about the subjective aspect of society, which, in its objective aspect, as we have seen, is merely the struggle and process of adjustment. What is the relation of adjustment to sympathy and to understanding, to communication and to concerted purpose, to the evolution of a social constraint through which the community controls and shapes the individual, to cooperation and to social organization? ”

“ The industrial, economic, domestic, civil, military, aesthetic, moral, religious, and intellectual condition of each community, is given in a systematic way, which brings out the relations of these social factors ”

“ The conclusion forced on us is that the pursuit of individual happiness within those limits prescribed by social conditions, is the first requisite to the attainment of the greatest general happiness. ”

“ The modification of men's moral natures, caused by the continuous discipline of social life, which adapts them more and more to social relations, is therefore the chief proximate cause of social progress. ”

“ Then a field for the study of human nature is opened up, and nowhere in the wide world is there a field equal to it. Does anyone want to study the drink question?—here’s the chance; the social evil?—here’s the opportunity; causes of crime?—here they may be found. Every vice and every virtue, and every source of strength and every cause of weakness incidental to humanity are found here. Every phase of every social problem has its place here. The joys and pleasures of life, the sorrows and difficulties of life, the comedy and fun of life, the tragedy and despair of life, are illustrated here. ”

“ It's another social system, a rearrangement of your whole scheme of life, under which you and your children, and your children's children, may live with the dignity and freedom due to that strange and common gift of life which beats in your pulses and in mine. ”

“ Society, the special field for the cultivation of manners, would soon be sterile soil were it not abandoned during lenten intervals and summers in the country. After meeting a multitude of people and being obliged to adjust ourselves to only such matters as all can understand, what a relief it is to be in the open fields, social conventions dropped, responsibilities forgotten, and no regard for others marking our words, acts, or dress! ”

“ Everything now which is present in the individuals—the immediate concrete locations of all historical actuality—in the nature of impulse, interest, purpose, inclination, psychical adaptability, and movement of such sort that thereupon or therefrom occurs influence upon others, or the reception of influence from them—all this I designate as the content or the material of socialization. In and of themselves, these materials with which life is filled, these motivations which impel it, are not social in their nature. ”

“ WHEN one passes in review the individual causes that disturb and complicate our social life, by whatever names they are designated, and their list would be long, they all lead back to one general cause, which is this: the confusion of the secondary with the essential. Material comfort, education, liberty, the whole of civilization—these things constitute the frame of the picture ”

“ That which, when we become capable of reflection, we term conscience, consists in pleasure in forms of action furthering the welfare of society—forms gradually moulded to habit with the development of social relations,—and in a corresponding pain at the realization of having failed of such action; the knowledge of the demand, by society as a whole or by a part of society, of action in accord with the general welfare, and the sense of the justice of this demand, constituting the feeling of obligation and duty. ”

“ It seems in short to be his opinion, that the higher we advance in the social scale, the further we are off from the sanities and truths of human life. He consequently looks for these in ruder and humbler ranks: in the dwellings of the poor, in the hearts of the peasantry, and the intuitions of uncorrupted childhood. ”

“ The social problem—if for simplicity we may speak as though social tasks were one—is how to socialize ourselves to such degree that, without bankrupting all, each may have a secure lien upon a minimum share of nature's endowment for satisfying common human wants. ”

“ It is capable of presenting life as a connected whole and of showing the interplay of influences, the action of values on attitudes. It can reveal the predominant wishes in different temperaments, the incidents constituting turning points in life, the processes of sublimation or transfer of interest from one field to another, the effect of other personalities in defining situations and the influence of social organizations like the family, the school, the acquaintance group, in forming the different patterns of life-organization. ”

“ Such is exactly my present feeling,—an unutterable weariness of the aggressive characteristics of existence in a highly organized society. The higher the social development, the sharper the struggle. One feels this especially in America,—in the nervous centres of the world's activity. ”

“ In proportion to the incongruity between the natures men inherit from the pre-social state, and the requirements308 of social life, must be the amount of pain entailed by their actions, either on themselves or on others. ”

“ As they evolve, there arise certain conditions to be fulfilled for the maintenance of social life; and, in proportion as the social life becomes high, these conditions need to be more effectually fulfilled. ”

“ The success or failure of this effort to assure individual adjustment to the social norm and conformity to its practices varies with the prosilitizing enthusiasm of the society and with the ration of adaptability and self-consciousness of its individual members. ”

“ This mental activity guides not only individual human conduct but also that of the group. Instinct impels the man to defend his family from hardship or his clan from defeat, and reason confirms the [4] impulse. His sociable disposition urges him to co-operate in industry, and reason sanctions his inclination. The history of society reveals an increasing influence of the intellect in thus directing instinct and feeling. It is a law of social activity that it tends to become more rational with the increase of education and experience. ”

“ All that was pronounced “good,” in man, in “the beginning” is innate in human nature. Social life and social relations are the life school in which this “good”-ness can be educed, strengthened, matured, in the individual. ”

“ The family group and the social group have each sprung from different tendencies, from distinct needs; each has its special, independent psychological origin, and there is no possible derivation from one to the other.
III. Life in common, even under the gregarious form, requires certain ways of acting, and habits founded on sympathy and determined by the concerted aim pursued by all. In order that it may become stable and constitute a society, an element of fixity must be added—the more or less clear consciousness of an obligation, of a rule, of what has to be done or avoided. ”

“ By the time we find ourselves here we are caught in a network of customs and attitudes, the major directions of our desires and interests have been stamped on our minds, and by the time we have emerged from tutelage and reached the years of discretion when we might conceivably throw our influence to the reshaping of social institutions, most of us have been so molded into the society [190] and class we live in that we are scarcely aware of any distinction between ourselves as judging, desiring individuals and our social environment. ”

“ Of all these wider, more potential selves, the potential social self is the most interesting, by reason of certain apparent paradoxes to which it leads in conduct, and by reason of its connection with our moral and religious life. ”

“ We shall see that, in the light of the specific and natural tendencies toward social behavior which are part of man's original equipment, this sharp psychological isolation between the individual and the group is an altogether unwarranted assumption. ”

“ Part I consists of an analysis of the types of behavior, a survey of individual traits and their significance in social life, a brief consideration of the nature and development of the self, individual differences, language and communication, racial and cultural continuity. Those fruits of psychological inquiry have been stressed which bear most strikingly on the relations of men in our present-day social and economic organization. ”

“ Each individual would thus have the stereotype of his effective social life cast; each social being would have his effective life formulated, if one may so speak, by relation, always by relations, nothing but by relations—to that of all the rest, but in figures, and yet again, in nothing but figures. ”

“ SOCIAL WILL AND SOCIAL HABITS.—Within the province of the social will fall what may not inaptly be called the habits of a community—ways of acting acquired largely without premeditation and followed to a great extent through mere inertia. The province of the social will is a broad one. Deliberate choices; those half-conscious choices analogous to the unheeded expressions of preference which fill the days of the individual; impulses and tendencies which scarcely emerge into the light—all are expressions of the social will. ”

“ Society corresponds better to its definition in proportion as it creates itself." This consideration of the developing social consciousness will determine the categories which we are to apply to the explanation of its movements. ”

“ There are three successive states of morality answering to the three principal stages of human life; the personal, the domestic, and the social stage. ”

“ If, however, the standard of living which one has inherited from his class is adopted as an individual standard, and is made the object of effort and self-denial, the individual and social results are of high value. ”

“ We remind our young people from time to time that conventions established in sophisticated society have usually a sound basis in social experience, and the cultivation of the minor morals of good manners develops consideration for others. ”

“ Or is there perhaps a third and a better possibility that for the very reason that they are changing its form they are increasing its possibilities for social usefulness and for the enrichment of individual lives? ”

“ Even the simplest, most instinctive, wants of human nature are, in their concrete manifestations, the product of social culture in overwhelming degree. Consider sex and hunger. We do not enjoy our food when our neighbors pick their teeth with their forks. ”

“ The social, moral, and ethical emotions are believed to have arisen in the race by reason of the association of individuals in communities and the rise of the necessity for mutual aid and forbearance. ”

“ That means that every community, through the very character of the environment which it imposes upon the individuals that compose it, tends to determine the personal traits as it does determine the language, the vocation, social values, and, eventually, the personal opinions, of the individuals who compose it. ”

“ The individual and social instincts,—the one a most potent factor for individual endeavor, for growth, aspiration, self-realization; the other an equally potent factor for mutual helpfulness and social well-being. ”

“ New social desires.—One of the new experiences you will have, will be the desire for social privileges. You will want a little girl chum. This is perfectly natural. God has given you a social nature. You should cultivate your social gifts. ”

“ The separation of morals from human nature leads to a separation of human nature in its moral aspects from the rest of nature, and from ordinary social habits and endeavors which are found in business, civic life, the run of companionships and recreations. ”

“ For this reason, above all, the dangers of social life demand that the necessary skill and care shall be devoted to guarding the human heart against the depravity which springs from fresh needs.
Man’s proper study is that of his relation to his environment. ”

“ It treats of the relation of social psychology to political science, jurisprudence, economics, history and sociology, analyzing the psychological assumptions underlying the behavior of men living in social relations. ”

“ Social reality in its every aspect is shot through and through with feeling. Whatever be the categories according to which we divide social phenomena, feeling of some sort will have to be recognized in each and all of them. ”

“ Reviewing the development in society of the conditions for the satisfaction of the individual will to live, and to live in the best way conceivable, we see in the progress of moral ideas the progress of discovery of the most reasonable manner of ordering the life of the individual and the form of social institutions under the contemporary environment. ”

“ This world would appear to such an insight as a Social Order. For the categories of the World of Appreciation, as we shall later more fully see, when we come to the study of our human Social consciousness, are the categories of the Self in Social form and expression. But as I discriminate the world, taking account now of ɑ and now of b, my discrimination, determined as it is by the interest of ray individual development, does not seize upon the facts in the order in which they are actually determined by the Will whose expression is the world. ”