common denominator among all the shifting and unstable relationships.
Attachment is a very different function of life from affection.
Affections will continue as long as the heart beats. But attachment
requires something more than organic causes. The very things which
stimulate and intensify affections may undermine attachments. For
these are bred in tranquil stability; they are nourished in constant
relationships. Acceleration of mobility disturbs them at their root.
And without abiding attachments associations are too shifting and
shaken to permit a public readily to locate and identify itself.
The new era of human relationships in which we live is one marked by
mass production for remote markets, by cable and telephone, by cheap
printing, by railway and steam navigation. Only geographically did
Columbus discover a new world. The actual new world has been generated
in the last hundred years. Steam and electricity have done more to
alter the conditions under which men associate together than all the
agencies which affected human relationships before our time. There
are those who lay the blame for all the evils of our lives on steam,
electricity and machinery. It is always convenient to have a devil as
well as a savior to bear the responsibilities of humanity. In reality,
the trouble springs rather from the ideas and absence of ideas in
connection with which technological factors operate. Mental and moral
beliefs and ideals change more slowly than outward conditions. If
the ideals associated with the higher life of our cultural past have
been impaired, the fault is primarily with them. Ideals and standards
formed without regard to the means by which they are to be achieved
and incarnated in flesh are bound to be thin and wavering. Since the
aims, desires and purposes created by a machine age do not connect
with tradition, there are two sets of rival ideals, and those which
have actual instrumentalities at their disposal have the advantage.
Because the two are rivals and because the older ones retain their
glamor and sentimental prestige in literature and religion, the newer
ones are perforce harsh and narrow. For the older symbols of ideal life
still engage thought and command loyalty. Conditions have changed,
but every aspect of life, from religion and education to property and
trade, shows that nothing approaching a transformation has taken place
in ideas and ideals. Symbols control sentiment and thought, and the
new age has no symbols consonant with its activities. Intellectual
instrumentalities for the formation of an organized public are more
inadequate than its overt means. The ties which hold men together in
action are numerous, tough and subtle. But they are invisible and
intangible. We have the physical tools of communication as never
before. The thoughts and aspirations congruous with them are not
communicated, and hence are not common. Without such communication the
public will remain shadowy and formless, seeking spasmodically for
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