Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/625

 PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW OF SOCIETY 6ii

rdation involves the material environment also. It is exactly such a process of correlation with which biologists, especially since Darwin, have dealt under the name of adaptation. It seems to me that even if Professor Ellwood may be said to recognize the environment in his paper, he does not adequately emphasize it, nor the mutual character of its relations in the process of individual and communal change.

I cannot but feel also, that, given a proper emphasis, the term adapta- tion describes the process most fittingly, and most in accord with the de- veloping historical traditions of cur subject.

Professor EUwood's paper is a swift review of a broad field. It flies over this field, perhaps at a dangerous distance away from earth. While endeavoring to avoid a detailed critique, I have thought it worth while to delve below the surface, in order to discover the assumptions on which such a paper is based. I have found these assumptions interesting because they prove to underlie not only Professor EUwood's paper but all the chief studies made from the same point of view. We may call them, in fact, the long-utilized but only partially formulated premises of psychological sociology.

These premises are:

1. Social unity. — A society is a unity, functional, not organic, of mutu- ally interrelating, coinfluencing parts.

Though overworked and distorted by the old "biological school," this premise has been part of the modern sociologist's stock since Spencer.

2. The interaction of minds. — Society is a nexus of similar minds which interact. The "minds" are "similar" within limits of normal variation and their interaction is mutual.

This thought has been employed more or less for three generations, but was first fully utilized by Gabriel Tarde.

3. The range of mental interaction. — The range is limited only by the natural conditions imposed by the varying power of different minds to apprehend stimuli and to respond. Artificial limits upon mental interaction such as social caste or class, are not assumed in general sociological theory.

I wish to point out that this third premise has been tacitly assumed in the psychological sociology of all recent writers, from Tarde or Durk- heim to Giddings, Ross, or Professor Ellwood himself. Where limits upon the range of mental interaction are considered, these limitations are regarded as exceptional, or as special cases as contrasted with the fundamental general case.

This premise has been assumed, not formulated, and it has not been perceived that we have in the premise nothing less than the psychological formulation of democracy. The society to which the third premise applies is a society working under, or to, the democratic ideal — or, rather, in so far as the third premise actually applies, in just so far is the society actually democratic.