Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/234

 222 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

jective explanations to other sciences, and by confining itself to an elaboration of the objective explanation. But this would be to abandon entirely the claim to the unity of social phenomena. The volitional process is obviously essential. If there is no unity here, there is none anywhere in society; apparent unity is a circumstance of the physical basis only."

We must carefully avoid associating false conceptions with the terms social mind and social consciousness. They do not stand for mere abstractions. The social mind is a concrete thing. It is more than any individual mind and dominates every individual will. Yet it exists only in individual minds, and we have no knowledge of any consciousness but that of individuals. The social consciousness, then, is nothing more than the feeling or the thought that appears at the same moment in all individuals, or that is propagated from one to another through the assembly or the community."

In a true social self-consciousness, which must be described rather than defined, the distinctive peculiarity is that each individual makes his neighbor's feeling or judgment an object of thought, at the same instant that he makes his own feeling or thought such an object; that he judges the two to be identical, and that he then acts with a full consciousness that his fellows have come to like conclusions, and will act in like ways."

A fruitful source of error with Professor Giddings is his failure to distinguish between a thinking process and the objective content of that process. He assumes that a feeling or thought is a thing which may appear in many individual minds at once. Of course, many persons may think about the same object, may reach similar conclusions, and as a result of such thinking may act in similar ways; but this does not mean that the many thinking processes constitute a single process, nor the many volitional pro- cesses a single volitional process, even if the objective contents are precisely the same and the conclusions and overt activities entirely similar. If each of ten men sees a fire, and all think and feel that it ought to be extinguished, and all co-operate in extin- guishing it, we do not have, from a psychological standpoint, one thought, one feeling, nor one volitional process. Each man's experience is a whole experience and not a mere part. The unity of the group is to be found entirely on the side of the objective situation and the overt activity. For the psychologist, as such, thought has no meaning other than a thinking process. The objective content of thought is not the subject-matter of psy-

"Ibid., p. 13. "Ibid., p. 134- "Ibid., p. 137- "Op. cit.. ,.. ..;.