Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/843

 THE BASIS OF SOCIAL SOLIDARITY 829

and even the rule of tradition, with its compulsion, do not result in those forms of organization which show progress. Both indi- viduals' advance in the more complicated relations of life, and also the formation of institutions of social utility, require in- ventive thought on the part of single men, and the adoption of this thought on the part of society. Jt is from the individual that the inventive ideas come; and these ideas cause discussion and opposition as well as imitative absorption and plastic propagation. It is only after society has generalized the individual's thoughts in a form acceptable to the social body, that these can be embodied in institutions of public value. Only thus is matter added to the social store.

This process requires, it is evident, competent individual re~ flection and discriminating judgment; it cannot be reduced to mere emotional reaction, nor to the constraint of enforced tradi- tion.

3. The treatment of this highest mode of solidarity falls accordingly to sociology and social psychology. To social psy- chology, it presents the experience of individual reflection and self-consciousness, implicating a social situation — a set of social fellows or socii — in relationships of actual life. From this flow the common processes which result in the establishment of institutions having the support of the fellow-members of the group. For sociology this g^ves an objective social situation : the related group is made matter of scientific investigation. For both these sciences the subject-matter is siii generis: for psychol- ogy, it is an experience sui generis; for sociology, it is a mode of organization sui generis. Sociology can properly investigate it only by detailed and exhaustive investigation of the forms it actually shows.

4. In all the discussions of solidarity, therefore, the first re- quirement is that of determining, in the particular case, which of these typical modes of collective life we have before us. Religion, for example, goes through all three of these genetic stages; so also does government ; so also does morality. It is vain to discuss any one of these great topics of human interest from the point of view of the analysis of one stage only. Our investigation