Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/627

 PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW OP SOCIETY 613

of speech. Further investigation of the essential nature of society reveals the fact that the reality which we vaguely and inaccurately conceived under the name "social mind" was society itself, and gives us back the concept which we temporarily had lost, now amplified and rendered more exact.

Society is the interdependent activities which go on in individual streams of consciousness. Every atom of primary social reality is in the con- sciousness of someone, though that which is in the consciousness of any one is only a tiny portion of the vast whole. If this process of interde- pendent activities were to cease — ^this believing, desiring, working, fight- ing — society would not be. A population of human animals without these interwoven activities would not be a society, the biological phenomena of human life are external conditions of the reality which sociology has to explain. All the facts that sociology can explain are psychic facts, except in so far as the explanation of psychic activities explains their immediate consequences, the overt deeds or works of man.

My criticism of Professor Ellwood's paper is upon a matter of emphasis assigned to activities and the relations between activities. He said, "Society is a plexus of interactions .... dependent on psychic activities"; I should reverse that and say that society is a plexus of psychic activities dependent upon their interactions.

This is not a mere matter of emphasis. There is no more fundamental methodological question than: What is to be explained, and what kind of causal relations furnish the explanation? The interwoven activities are the realities to be explained; the relations between them are the main factors in the explanation. There is no third reality to be called "m^^ractions," apart from activities and the relations between activities by which they condition each other.

The tendency to describe society, our object of explanation, in terms of relation or "interaction," rather than in terms of prevalent activities, may be due to a sociological bias; sociologists must investigate social realities, and interrelationships are obviously social. But prevalent activities are just as certainly and essentially social. They are social, first, because they are not merely individual but prevalent; and, second, because for every individual these prevalent activities constitute the social environment in which he moves, the vast and intricate whole the evolution of which from small beginnings genetic sociology must make intellig^ible ; and, finally, because the individual's own participation in the process is socially caused and conditioned — any one of us would find it hard to name a single belief, ambition, endeavor, practice, or any activity, beyond what is due to the mere physical functioning of his animal org^anism, which he would carry on as he does if his life had been isolated. The individual's stream of conscious activity is his share in the social process and except as such would be impossible to him.

That which we vaguely conceived and called "the social mind" is society.