Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/466

 450 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

and fetichism as police agencies ; secret societies and their influ- ence in bringing about solidarity; property and its influence on association and habit ; popular assemblies among the natural races and their influence in promoting association ; offense and punish- ment, particularly the consideration of why an act is offensive and the process by which a punishment is selected to fit the offense these are materials furnishing a concrete approach to a psycho- logical study of association. In the play of attention about these practices we are able to trace steps in the development of the con- sciousness of the race.

Ethnology and the kindred sciences have already established the fact that human nature, the external world, and the funda- mental needs of life are everywhere much alike, and that there is, roughly speaking, a parallelism of development in all groups, or a tendency in every group which advances at all to take the same steps as those taken by other groups. Such phenomena as spirit-belief and accompanying ecclesiastical institutions, blood- vengeance preceding juridical institutions, a maternal system preceding patriarchal control, ecclesiastical and political despotism preceding democracy, and artistic, inventive, and mythical prod- ucts of the same general ground-pattern, show a general law of uniformity in progress: and it is one of the tasks of social psy- chology to work out from the standpoint of habit, attention, and stimulation what conditions have contributed to make differences in the progress of different groups; whether steps in progress, if taken at all, are invariably taken in the same order by all groups ; and why stimulation or opportunity is so lacking in some groups that old habits are not broken up at all, and the groups remain in consequence non-progressive. The study of parallelism in development not only throws light on social development, but the fact of a common possession of language, myth, religion, number, time, and space conceptions, political and legal organization, under conditions where the possibility of borrowing is precluded, indicates that the same general type of mind is a possession of all races, both low and high, and has an important bearing on educa- tional theory and the race questions.

Another extension of individual psychology to the region of