As children we have all amused ourselves by looking into a kaleidoscope,
turning it around and around and watching the changing patterns formed
from the mixing bits of different colored glass in the other end. Each
turn makes a different pattern and each bit of glass seems to seek a
spot in the general medley where it can be settled until another turn
drives it to find a resting place somewhere else. The organization of
individual units into a group is more or less such a formation, each
seeking to adjust itself to a pattern and finding that the pattern is
ever-changing and the individual units obliged to seek new positions and
make new adjustments.
It is vain for social theorists to talk of a perfect order, a system of
social organization that will find the proper place for each unit and
bring social symmetry out of the whole. Such a society is not consistent
with the varied capacities and wants of men. Neither is a perfect order
possible with ever-changing and moving physical forces, with new mental
conceptions, with new needs and wants, with constant births and deaths,
and with the innate instincts of man.
Some system may be the best for a time but must in turn give place to
new formations. In this process the old is ever mixed with the new. The
past hangs on to plague the present, and the vision of the future
disturbs the quiet and stability that the present inherited from the
past. Organizations of society are necessary and automatic. The frost on
the window pane takes its pattern, the crystals in the glass and stone
have their formations, the grain of sand, the plant--all forms of animal
life--the solar system and, doubtless, an infinite number of other
systems which the eye cannot see or the mind comprehend take on form and
order. The symmetry and shape of any of these organizations may be
shattered by growth or catastrophe, and new forms may take their place.
All life is constant friction and constant adjustment, each particle in
a blind way trying to find a more harmonious relation, but never
reaching complete rest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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