Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/619

 PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW OF SOCIETY 605

the nature of social habits. As has already been said, social habits are simply social co-ordinations that persist. In their various modifications they are known, in the larger human groups, as folkways, customs, manners, morals, laws, institutions, and the like. In brief, all the tangible uniformities of the social life are social habits. It is evident that they rest partly on instincts, partly on acquired habits. As has already been noted, in all social species, the instincts of individuals are made so that they fit into each other, as it were, and provide certain social co-ordinations to start with. This is especially triie of man — human family life, as we have just seen, illustrating these instinctive co-ordinations between individuals. Hence, the instinctive origin of human society — a doctrine now generally accepted by psychologists and sociologists alike. But it is also true that in man these social habits are largely acquired. While the original or instinctive co- ordinations between human individuals may be numerous, yet on account of the complexity of man's social life, these original social co-ordinations have become overlaid with a vast mass of acquired social habits that are even more important for the dis- tinctive character of human society than the instinctive co-ordina- tions. Hence the need in human society of definite forms of mental interaction, or interstimulation and response, whereby every individual may acquire the habits of his group. Hence also why human groups have developed such definite forms of inter- stimulation and response, as oral and written language, and superior types of suggestion and imitation.

But we must now leave the point of view of social habit, and ask what happens when social habits change, for we know that in social groups, as in individuals, habitual ways of action are continually being modified. The social co-ordination that exists today in a group of individuals may no longer exist tomorrow. Even the type of co-ordination itself changes. Now, in a group of individuals carrying on a common life-process by interstimu- lation and response, there must be some very definite mechanism by which habitual ways of interaction are modified or even radi- cally changed. That mechanism is found in the various forms of communication and in other simpler forms of interstimulation.