fixed by the immediate responses of touch, sight, and
hearing. Its area has expanded to include connection through all the
forms of communication, i.e., language, letters, and the printed page;
connection through the medium of the telephone, telegraph, radio, moving
picture, etc. The evolution of the devices for communication has taken
place in the fields of two senses alone, those of hearing and seeing.
Touch remains limited to the field of primary association. But the
newspaper with its elaborate mechanism of communication gives publicity
to events in London, Moscow, and Tokio, and the motion picture unreels
to our gaze scenes from distant lands and foreign peoples with all the
illusion of reality.

The frontiers of social contact are farther extended to the widest
horizons, by commerce. The economists, for example, include in their
conception of society the intricate and complex maze of relations
created by the competition and co-operation of individuals and societies
within the limits of a world-wide economy. This inclusion of unconscious
as well as conscious reciprocal influences in the concept of social
relations brings into "contact" the members of a village missionary
society with the savages of the equatorial regions of Africa; or the
pale-faced drug addict, with the dark-skinned Hindu laborers upon the
opium fields of Benares; or the man gulping down coffee at the breakfast
table, with the Java planter; the crew of the Pacific freighter and its
cargo of spices with the American wholesaler and retailer in food
products. In short, everyone is in a real, though concealed and devious,
way in contact with every other person in the world. Contacts of this
type, remote from the familiar experiences of everyday life, have
reality to the intellectual and the mystic and are appreciated by the
masses only when co-operation breaks down, or competition becomes
conscious and passes into conflict.

These three popular meanings of contacts emphasize (1) the intimacy of
sensory responses, (2) the extension of contact through devices of
communication based upon sight and hearing, and (3) the solidarity and
interdependence created and maintained by the fabric of social life,
woven as it is from the intricate and invisible strands of human
interests in the process of a world-wide competition and co-operation.

2. The Sociological Concept of Contact

The use of the term "contact" in sociology is not a departure from, but
a