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 SOCIOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTION LINES 43

its meanings in that they are evolved through the process of social change and causation. Such an ideal has a social history, and that not alone after it has spread from man to man, and become the characteristic of a group s and embodied in those settled and approved methods of practice which we denominate institutions, but also it may be that even when it first looms up in the mind of the individual prophet or seer, it is already in an important sense a social product. That experience of the prophet would have been impossible but for a long process of social causation. How clearly this is true will appear somewhat in a later con- nection. The great pervasive social facts exemplify the " social process " also in the profounder meaning of that phrase, since .they exist in the sentiments, judgments, and deeds, that is, in the psychic activities of men.

We sometimes speak of certain buildings as "institutions;" and the usage may convey a certain meaning accurately enough for colloquial speech. But in the sense in which the sociologist employs the term, an institution is no more a thing of brick and mortar than the Sermon on the Mount is a thing of ink and paper. If our county courthouse should be burned down, would the institution of the courts be destroyed from our midst? No; it would still be here ready to rebuild the edifice. Where would it be? In the minds of the people. Similarly, the institution of the public schools is a conviction and a sentiment and a plan of action, including the readiness to use a hundred and fifty millions of dollars a year in ways approved for ends desired.

Not only institutions, ideals, moral standards, popular judg- ments and beliefs are psychic phenomena, which stand forth as commanding features of the objective psychic world, but also subtler phases of psychic activity may become pervasive and continental in extent. Similarity of sentiments and motives may characterize a population, and emotional dispositions, which are clue, not to ethnic temperament alone, but to other causes also, since they pervade mixed populations, and, moreover, prevail for a period among a given people and then disappear and are replaced. Whole peoples may be said to have their moods, their periods of exaltation and of depression, of courage and of dis-