Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/474

 458 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

lenge general attention. Tarde's resolution of these processes into the repetition and in-and-in weaving of two elementary phenomena, the novel combination of ideas in the individual mind invention and the action of mind on mind suggestion- imitation is the only plausible explanation that has ever been offered, and it doubtless leads a long way toward the solution of the problem.

No chapters in sociology will be so attractive as those which treat of human groupings. It took men a long time to discover the atmosphere, because everything else is seen through that medium. So it took a long time to discover the existence of subjective environments, because the social life of man was seen through the refracting prejudices inspired by some one of these environments. If at last the thinker is coming to appreciate the lordly role of social groupings, it is because the fuller accounts of man in space ethnology and in time history afford so broad a basis for comparison that he can now lift himself above the narrow horizon of his date and place.

The union of men concerns us here, not because they flourish through their co-operation, but because their natures are corre- spondingly modified. The principles of organization, indeed, interest the social morphologist, but so long as associates remain quite self-centered, and cold-bloodedly look upon their society as a mere piece of mechanism helpful in the gaining of their private ends, there is nothing about their union to challenge the social psychologist. The fact is, however, that society reacts upon, transforms, even socializes its members. Properties appear which the elements in the beginning did not possess. It can be estab- lished, for instance, that the intellectual and moral traits of any group-unit depend not only upon the original characters of the units, but also upon two other things upon their mode of com- bination a morphological fact and their manner of inter- action a psychological fact. The true community at once enlarges and imprisons minds. The individual ceases to look upon his fellow co-operators as tools, his union with them as means to an end. A consciousness of his group seizes upon tym, and, whether we regard this striking obsession as a monstrous