Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/617

 PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW OF SOCIETY 603

understanding, however, of the types of social co-ordination, we must consider not merely their empty form, but also their con- tent.^ It is apparently an inexhaustible task to classify and arrange the various types of persistent interaction between indi- viduals. The progress of sociology as a science is, however, not dependent upon any exhaustive enumeration or classification of the types of social interaction. Rather, sociology must show the way in which types of social co-ordination arise and are changed into other types and the significance of the principal types for the collective life of man.

But the subjective expressions of social co-ordination are of not less importance than the objective expressions in folkways, customs, institutions, and social organization. Those subjective expressions are to be found in the mental attitudes which the individuals of the group maintain toward each other. A group of individuals carrying on a common life-process through inter- stimulation and response, must maintain certain habitual psychical attitudes toward each other in order that they may respond quickly and effectively, each to the stimulus which the activity of the others affords. Hence, the significance of feelings, emotions, ideas, and beliefs in all forms of human social organization. Feelings, emotions, ideas, and beliefs are, on the one hand ex- pressions of common life-activities, and on the other, they powerfully reinforce and direct those activities. The family group again illustrates the matter beautifully. The mental atti- tude of the members of a family toward one another is an expression of their common group life and group activities. Cor- responding to their habitual modes of interaction, are certain feelings, or emotional attitudes, and even certain ideas and beliefs. Thus, the social co-ordinations of husband and wife, parent and child, are each subjectively expressed by appropriate feeling, or emotional attitudes.

Inasmuch as the family group is organized largely on an instinctive basis, the subjective expressions of its co-ordinations

• Professor Cooley in his Social Organisation and Professor Ros5 in his Foundations of Sociology seem to me to have begun a much more fruitful analysis of the forms of association.