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 224 TH AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

tion, takes a position in some respects similar to that of Professor Giddings. He finds social unity in the common content of con- sciousness and in co-operative activity. The following quotations are taken from the above-mentioned book :

The sociological organism is in the final analysis a psychic organism."

A distinction must be made at the outset between individual and social consciousness. Each member of society may be conscious of his own thoughts and feelings, but it is only when these thoughts and feelings are common to a whole group that social consciousness appears. 19

Social consciousness is simply consciousness of the same thought or feeling on the part of communicating individuals."

Social self-consciousness implies a further element of purposive co-opera- tion between such individuals toward a more or less definite end. w

Elsewhere Professor Vincent guards against a misinterpreta- tion of his theory. He does not believe in a social over-soul. There is no consciousness but individual consciousness. The necessity for thus guarding himself arises from the fact that the statement that society is a psychic organism practically asserts what he denies. The expression " thoughts and feelings common to a whole group" involves the self-contradiction of the whole theory. " Common to " implies a plurality, but only one group is mentioned. The expression must mean common to the several persons of a group. But can one thinking process be a thing in which several persons participate? If so, this is a social and at the same time a psychic unity. Otherwise the unity lies entirely on the objective and overt side.

Dr. Charles A. Elwood's theory differs from those of Pro- fessors Giddings and Vincent in that he throws the emphasis over on the side of function. To Dr. Elwood the functional unity of the social process on the objective side is brought about through a unified psychic process. The following quotations are taken from his articles entitled " Prolegomena to Social Psychology," published in the AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY :

Now, the assumption that there are " mental phenomena dependent upon a community of individuals " "* presupposes psychical processes which are more than merely individual, which are inf^r-individual."

u The Social Mind and Education, p. 92.

10 Quoted from KULPB, Outlines of Psychology.
 * Ibid., pp. 1 8, 19. " Ibid., p. 69. u Ibid., p. 69.


 * AMERICAN JOURNAL or SOCIOLOGY, Vol. IV, p. 656.