Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/58

 42 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Both the vast pervasive social facts, and those that are local and personal, are psychic phenomena. When your friend is speaking to you, the objective social fact is not the noise he makes, but the thoughts that are passing in his mind, of which you become aware while listening to his voice, and to which your own thoughts respond. If he smiles, the objective social fact is not the wrinkling of his face, but the love and cheer which you read in his smile. Voice and smile may be necessary to enable us to perceive the objective social facts, as the ether is necessary to enable us to perceive the stars, and as some medium is required to enable us to see or to hear anything in our material environment. The social environment is made up of the objective psychic facts, and the physical signs are the media that enable us to become aware of our psychic environment. To perceive the very actions of the neurons in the cortex of your friend, without becoming aware of the conscious experience that accompanies the neuroses, would apprise you of no social fact; for the social fact is not the sign which is physical, but the thing signified, which is psychic.

It is persons that are associates, and personal acts that is, psychic acts: thoughts, feelings, and conscious deeds that are the social phenomena. The presence of other individuals, which is the social condition, is their psychic presence; and this by no means always requires their bodily presence. It is necessary only that they be present to the mind, in order to inspire us with love, hate, envy, emulation, ambition; the physical signs of their psychic activities may be totally absent, or may come to us across oceans of space and centuries of time.

The great pervasive social facts are as essentially and com- pletely psychic as are the facts of individual association. A great ideal that modifies the character and activities of a people, like the prevalent notion of the smart, successful man, or like our forefathers' ideal of liberty, is a purely psychic reality, but it may be as objective and imposing as a range of mountains, and ten times more causally significant of social consequences. The vast objective social facts are exemplifications of the social process in both the uses of that phrase. They exemplify one of