Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/613

 PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW OF SOCIETY 599

and practically most fundamental, fact for the sociologist is this co-ordination of individuals in activity — the social co-ordination.^

To trace out the mechanism of the origin, development, and forms of these co-ordinations constitutes, then, the task of the sociologist from the psychological point of view. But in doing this his point of view is necessarily that of the group, not that of the individual, for the individual in his instinctive and habitual reactions only gives at most the starting-point for these co- ordinations. The real reason for the existence of such co-ordina- tions must always be found in the carrying-on of a common life-process by a group of individuals, else they would not exist. The co-ordinations, in other words, are co-ordinations of indi- viduals in function, and the group must be considered as a functional unity in order to understand them.

Hence is justified methodologically the sociological point of view — the view of the group as a functional unity, and the inter- pretation of its phenomena from the standpoint of its collective life, from the standpoint of the mass as a whole. The sociologist does not consider the individual as such but only as a functioning element in the larger whole; while the psychologist, on the con- trary, considers the social whole only to throw light on individual experience as such. The study of interstimulation and response from the side of the individual would show only half of the whole process. Even in the interests of abstract science, it is quite as important that the process be studied from the point of view of the larger unity if the interstimulations and responses of individuals are determined, more or less, upon the basis of the needs and interests of a collective life-process. The process of individual interaction, to be sure, is dominantly a psychical process, in that its dominant elements are psychical; but it is, nevertheless, a social, not an individual, process and can be understood only from the social point of view — that is, from the point of view of the collective life of a group. The sociolo-

^ I first used the term "social co-ordination" in an article in the American Journal of Sociology for May, 1899. The term was used earlier by Professor Giddings in his Principles of Sociology, pp. 388-90. Lately Dr. M. M. Davis has described the same phenomenon (in his Psychological Interpretations of Society) with the term "co-adaptation."