Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/466

454 so on, but rather as phases of a continuous activity, isolated for convenience in treatment. The "self," as Professor James has brilliantly shown, is a very complex and even, so to speak, plural being. Personality, regarded as the purposive, interrelated and unified activity of various desires may thus be of all grades according to the degree to which impulses have passed into conscious desires, and desires in turn have become systematized into unity of steadfast purpose. With this in mind Wundt urges, that the social person is as "real" as the individual person; "so viel Actualität, so viel Realität" is true in either sphere.

Taking such a conception of personality as an analogy or guiding clue, many fruitful suggestions, it seems to me, may come to the sociologist. True it is that in individual and in society the early life is impulsive, unrelated, with little conscious unity of purpose, yet with language and religion and art, with industrial and intellectual coöperation, many a people has come to "know what it wants," and to act unitedly in order to get it. As Bernès puts it, "Every collective aspiration which by its realization results in consolidating the group, in making it more complex, more plastic, more conscious of itself, becomes thereby a cause of progress. Society corresponds better to its definition in proportion as it creates itself." This consideration of the developing social consciousness will determine the categories which we are to apply to the explanation of its movements. We examine, of course, the reactions of structure and function, we observe the influence of natural selection upon choices (Giddings), but we bear in mind that "response to environment" in the case of conscious intelligence may mean a response which transforms the environment as well as a response which is modified by it. Just in proportion as man individually or collectively comes to consciousness must we use the category of purpose or