Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/743

 THE PRESENT STATUS OF SOCIOLOGY IN GERMANY 727

comparatively little has been done towards making such exhibits" (p. 10). "In other respects also, which do not belong immediately to evolution and dissolution, the social body proves itself in its structure and life not essentially but only in degree different from the material systems and processes of organic and inorganic nature " (p. 19) . "The psychophysical and the physical phenomena of the social life are to be sure incomparably more complex and evolved than those of individual life; they manifest nothing (sic), however, the germ of which does not appear in the life of individual men, or which is not in part suggested at least in lower animal life" (p. 703). And thus he proceeds with all sorts of variations.

Now, in my opinion, the truth is precisely the opposite of all this. If we contemplate society as a totality, or with Schaeffle as an organism, we have at least in view an organism of a wholly peculiar sort. We need not first make profound studies and penetrating observations in order to discover that a coherent mass of men, a society, is something different from a mere sum, or the product of its individuals. If society were only a higher potency of the individual organisms, or if, as Schaeffle expresses himself, "the differentiating and characterizing marks of the social body" were "merely the universality and high spiritu- alization of its components and of their movements " it would be a necessary consequence that the psychical energy of the mass must increase in proportion as the number of individuals increases. The first and strongest effect of mass association is, as a matter of fact, unquestionably a reduction of the level of psychical force, a grinding down to the measure of the average. This observation had been made even by Schiller, who in sociology accomplished if possible still less than Schaeffle. "Each individual," he says, "seems to me fairly wise and intelligent. Let them incorporate and the result is a block- head." The explanation is not far to seek. The universal, the generic, is in each. On the other hand, the special, the higher, tin more spiritual belongs only to individuals. In the coexist- ence of the mass, this general, possessed by all, alone comes to