Is our religious thinking so feeble that we actually expect to solve the problem of worship by saying and singing within the sanctuary sentiments that are contradicted by the very walls and roof that shelter the congregation? On the other hand, is our economic thinking to be so abstract as to go on assuming that the aspirations of the heart of man are for the inside of the sanctuary, and not equally for quarry, mine, mill, and banking house? The unstable state of both organized religion and the industrial and economic structure at the present time suggests that we are in the grip of an inevitable issue. It is not over-rash to surmise that we are going to have a spiritualized industrial and economic order, or else a pseudo-spiritual and actually degraded religion. Degraded, that is, by increasing subservience to an unspiritual system of dealing with the material resources of nature. That there is any inescapable drag in the direction of such a fatal system does not appear from any broadly objective scrutiny of the motives of either capitalist or worker. On both sides mixed motives are the rule, and the two mixtures largely coincide. On either side one or another motive gains or loses influence by the shifting of conditions that are within our power. It is as if the ancient word had been spoken to our generation: “I have laid before you life and death; choose life.” After three years’ experience as a worker in mines and factories, Whiting Williams declares that the mainspring of the worker--we have seen that this is true also of the employer--is the wish for worth, the wish to be a person, to realize that he counts and that others recognize the fact; and, Williams adds, “through our work, if anywhere in all the universe, we may hope to become a person, meaningful and valuable--aye, indispensable--to others.”[6] XVIII THE MOTIVE THAT IS IN ALL AND THROUGH ALL The lines of our inquiry converge upon the following conception of the motives of men: Rooted in the conditions of individual and racial life are various “drives” that are related to nutrition, sex, avoidance of discomfort and danger, activity and repose, and the presence or conduct of other members of the species. But these are not elementary units that in their aggregate constitute human motivation. For, in and through them, using them, giving meaning to them, and creating new meanings through them, is the affirmation of a personal self, and the coordinate and equally inevitable affirmation of other selves. And this affirmation of selves does not consist in sucking at the breast of Nature, but in reconstructing the gifts of Nature, and in constructing and reconstructing ourselves and society to suit ourselves as our experiences, desires, and insights evolve.