f material units which
_may_ enter into disorder. Society is based upon social consciousness,
upon the consciousness of kind, but it also has _collective force_.
The crowd and the collective force are always contained in society.
However far human nature is removed from its primitive form, the
social order is always fragile. Mental operations that are not
intelligent and are not emotional in the ordinary sense, but which
consist, so to speak, of common factors among primitive feelings, may
gain and for a time hold the ascendancy. Eruptions in the social
consciousness are of the nature of morbid phenomena, and are rare and
exceptional expressions of the collective life, but we are never free
entirely from the menace of them. Social order, we say, is always
fragile. We must not overlook that fact. It is this characteristic of
the social life, the potentiality of mob spirit and the forces of
primitive anger and fear, that lead some writers to think, wrongly we
believe, that this is the psychological basis of wars in general. War
comes out of the order of society. The higher ecstatic states and the
ideals of man enter into them. These things we speak of are of the
nature of disorder, or are only the order of pure momentum. But
whatever the truth may be about the relation of instinct to war and
however remote the dangers to ourselves from the forces which in
society make for disorder, it is the work of social education to
control, transform and utilize all social and collective forces, the
primitive emotions and instincts, the moods of intoxication and all
the higher ecstasies of the social life, and it is only, we suppose,
by thus consciously and with premeditation controlling these forces
that in any real sense we can "make democracy safe for the world."

It is the idea of society cooerdinated by intelligence and by common
interests and moods that we must always hold before us. Trotter says
that civilization has never brought a well-cooerdinated society, and
that a gregarious unit consciously directed would be a new type of
biological organism. If this be so, the time seems peculiarly ripe to
make advance toward this better social solidarity. Both the promise
and the need seem greatest in the great English speaking countries
now. There is waiting, we may truly think, a larger sphere of life for
all democratic countries. If it be conscious direction alone that can
bring about the change, education has a long and a hard task