eresting activity of personal, skilled, handicraft
work. The so-called "instinct of workmanship" no longer finds expression
in the anonymous standardized production of modern industry.[120]

It is not in industry alone that the natural impulses of the person for
response, recognition, and self-expression are balked. In social work,
politics, religion, art, and sport the individual is represented now by
proxies where formerly he participated in person. All the forms of
communal activity in which all persons formerly shared have been taken
over by professionals. The great mass of men in most of the social
activities of modern life are no longer actors, but spectators. The
average man of the present time has been relegated by the influence of
the professional politician to the role of taxpayer. In social work
organized charity has come between the giver and the needy.

In these and other manifold ways the artificial conditions of city life
have deprived the person of most of the natural outlets for the
expression of his interests and his energies. To this fact is to be
attributed in large part the restlessness, the thirst for novelty and
excitement so characteristic of modern life. This emotional unrest has
been capitalized by the newspapers, commercialized recreations, fashion,
and agitation in their appeal to the sensations, the emotions, and the
instincts loosened from the satisfying fixations of primary-group life.
The _raison d'etre_ of social work, as well as the fundamental problem
of all social institutions in city life must be understood in its
relation to this background.

II. MATERIALS

A. PHYSICAL CONTACT AND SOCIAL CONTACT

1. The Frontiers of Social Contact[121]

Sociology deals especially with the phenomena of _contact_. The
reactions which result from voluntary or involuntary contact of human
beings with other human beings are the phenomena peculiarly "social," as
distinguished from the phenomena that belong properly to biology and
psychology.

In the first place, we want to indicate, not the essence of the social,
but the location, the sphere, the extent, of the social. If we can agree
where it is, we may then proceed to discover what it is. The social,
then, is the term next beyond the individual. Assuming, for the sake of
analysis, that our optical illusion, "the individual," is an isolated
and self-sufficient fact, there are many sorts of scientific problems
that do not need to go beyond thi