Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/467

Rh end in explaining his activity. Just in so far can we look for voluntary change of activity. Society, like the individual, can move forward, if it will, but to "will" means for society, as for the individual, a completely intelligent and "mediated" desire, not a mere impulse nor a blind though intense feeling. Numerous other principles will suggest themselves, such as the relation of sociological theory to practice where evidently the greatest current need is that felt by Socrates for the individual, self-examination and an insight into the true good of life that shall afford a criterion of the value of particular acts and aims. But I pass on to notice another illustration of the psychological tendency, viz., the definitions offered of social facts.

Here indeed the intimate relation to psychology seems often to be felt as an embarrassment. If, as by some, social facts are defined as psychical facts, how shall we distinguish them from the facts studied by psychology? Where draw the line between social and individual psychology? In some cases, at least, the difficulty seems due to a lack of clearness on the relation between the individual and the social, which has its counterpart in the history of thought in the controversies over the particular and the universal. A statement like that of Durkheim's, quoted above, that a "collective sentiment which flashes into life in an assembly is something quite other than the common element of all the individual sentiments," seems to be aimed at such statements as those of Mill, "men are not, when brought together, converted into another kind of substance;" "human beings in society have no properties but those which are derived from and may be resolved into the laws of the nature of individual man." But it really suffers from the same individualism. There is no individual man for ethics, for psychology, for logic, or for sociology, except by abstraction,—that is if by individual man we mean a being not influenced by social forces,—nor are there any feelings, thoughts or volitions in any man which are independent of such forces. On the other hand, there is no social or collective sentiment which exists except in the medium of individual consciousness. In the words of Sigwart, "there are no thoughts