Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/470

 454 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Chinese individual should be well educated or intelligent in the western sense, however assiduously he attends his school, since there is no organized body of knowledge of which he can get pos- session. At the same time, the member of this society may be able to master any knowledge in the possession of any group, if given access to it. In a study of this character we have therefore an opportunity to distinguish between the mental state of the indi- vidual and the state of knowledge in the group. Neither the eastern question, nor the negro question, nor questions of crime and social reform, nor of pedagogy, can be safely approached unless we make this distinction between the mind of the individual and the state of culture in his group.

Perhaps the most urgent of all demands on social psychology at the present moment comes from psychology and pedagogy, and is for a more definite and scientific statement on the question of epochs in social development, and the relation between stages of development in the consciousness of the individual and epochs of culture. There is an anthropological theory that there have been more or less clearly marked stages of social development, char- acterized by equally marked activities, and mental conditions corresponding with the types of activity prevalent in the different epochs. Psychology assumes further that there is a parallelism between the mental growth of the child and these culture-epochs that the child passes in a recapitulatory way through phases corresponding with the epochs in race-development. Pedagogy is actually operating on the assumption of such a parallelism. It may well be, however, that the whole assumption is a misappre- hension. There is another view that the brain like the body of man was made up in the earliest times on a successful principle, and that it has not changed materially since, showing merely a capacity to manage new problems as they have arisen in the out- side world, using motor, perceptual, and co-ordinative processes more in the earlier, and abstract processes more in the later, stages of development. If this view is correct, the brain of the child recapitulates the brain of the race only in the sense that the accumulated knowledge and standpoint of the race are so pre- sented to him, and with such urgency and system that habits are