Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/235

THE NATURE OF THE SOCIAL UNITY 22} chology, but it is the subject-matter, and all the subject-matter, of all the sciences treating of objective reality.

This does not in any sense deny the fact that for the explanation of social phenomena we must bring in the psychic individual. It only means that the social process in its unity is not psychic. The botanist explains the plant-process in part by means of certain chemical processes. But this does not make the plant a chemical unity. From the standpoint of the chemist, the plant-process is not a process, but a multitude of processes describable in terms of ions, atoms, and molecules. In a similar way the sociologist must explain the social process by means of psychic processes ; and, similarly, unity is lost and plurality got by taking the point of view of the psychologist.

If, then, we attempt to describe the activity of several co-operating persons in terns of psychic processes, we have not unity, but plurality. If, on the other hand, we conceive of the activity of all as a single unified process — a social process — we must describe it in objective, not in psychological, terms. In a social group all the members may think and feel and act with reference to the same objective situation. To say that they participate in one thought — thinking process — would imply the existence of a "transcendental somewhat," which Professor Giddings repudiates.

Whether an activity is social or not does not depend upon its psychic character — whether it is imitative or not — nor upon similarity of the objective content of consciousness on the part of associated individuals, nor yet upon their purposive co-operation toward a single objective end. If the activity is socially conditioned, if it derives its meaning from the fact that the actor is a social being, if it does practically tend to maintain the situation — the social process — then it is social. It is impossible to divide up an individual's activity into social and non-social. All his activity is social. The activity of a savage who climbs a tree for fruit with which to satisfy his hunger is as truly social as that of the orator before his audience, or that of the chieftain leading his followers.

Professor George E. Vincent, in his Social Mind and Educa-