ct, from the animal world by being
composed of persons of divergent types, of varied tastes and interests,
of different vocations and functions. Civilization is the product of an
association of widely different individuals, and with the progress of
civilization the divergence in individual human types has been and must
continue to be constantly multiplied. Our progress in the arts and
sciences and in the creation of values in general has been dependent on
specialists whose distinctive worth was precisely their divergence from
other individuals. It is even evident that we have been able to use
productively individuals who in a savage or peasant society would have
been classed as insane--who perhaps were indeed insane.

The ability to participate productively implies thus a diversity of
attitudes and values in the participants, but a diversity not so great
as to lower the morals of the community and to prevent effective
co-operation. It is important to have ready definitions for all
immediate situations, but progress is dependent on the constant
redefinitions for all immediate situations, and the ideal condition for
this is the presence of individuals with divergent definitions, who
contribute, in part consciously and in part unconsciously, through their
individualism and labors to a common task and a common end. It is only
in this way that an intelligible world, in which each can participate
according to his intelligence, comes into existence. For it is only
through their consequences that words get their meanings or that
situations become defined. It is through conflict and co-operation, or,
to use a current phrase of economists, through "competitive
co-operation," that a distinctively human type of society does anywhere
exist. Privacy and publicity, "society" and solitude, public ends and
private enterprises, are each and all distinctive factors in human
society everywhere. They are particularly characteristic of historic
American democracy.

In this whole connection it appears that the group consciousness and the
individual himself are formed by communication and participation, and
that the communication and participation are themselves dependent for
their meaning on common interests.

But it would be an error to assume that participation always implies an
intimate personal, face-to-face relation. Specialists participate
notably and productively in our common life, but this is evidently not
on the basis of personal