ABSTRACT
Everything in nature is instinct with social meaning and enshrined in social ceremony. Culture, technique, authority, people, and land are subjectively unified. In the culminating period the analytic spirit that detaches the cultural from the utilitarian at length attacked the social bond. “Custom is the king of men,” Herodotus had said, viewing with dispassionate curiosity the opposing mores of different peoples, and the sophists were quick to draw the conclusion that the union of men in society has no warrant but convention. The endlessly variant situations in which the general pattern of social change is forever presenting itself anew are well revealed in the growth of our own civilization. Its matrix was a social system that, concreted out of heterogeneous elements in an age-long turmoil and mingling of populations within the broken frame of an older civilization, at length took definite shape in Western Europe.
