Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/557

 REVIEWS 543

the dialectic of his growth. The analogy, therefore, is striking between the process of individual development and that of social growth, which may be described as "a growth in a sort of self-consciousness an awareness of itself."

The question of individual versus socials anctions may be approached, on the one hand, from the standpoint of the three forms of personal sanction, and, on the other, from that of the types of social sanction which are derived from four classes of institutions natural, pedagog- ical and conventional, civil, and religious. The impulsive personal sanction and the demands arising from natural social relationships, such as those of the family, are not two things, but one. Hence there can be no conflict here. The conditions of success which society lays down in training its members, once voluntarily accepted by the indi- vidual, become personal means to his own ends, and again we have unity in the personal sanction of desire and the conventional require- ments of society. For normal or average persons the great body of citizens there must be a similar identity in personal ethical judgments and the collective civil and religious sanctions, for the very reason that by the dialectic of personal growth these individuals have made the accepted standards of their society their own. It is true, nevertheless, that in the case of exceptional persons, or the exceptional judgments of average persons, there are intellectual and ethical oppositions between personal and social sanctions. The anti -social exceptions are suppressed, while persons of extraordinary ability by their very oppo- sition to the established order upset the equilibrium of custom and compel a readjustment on a higher plane.

Professor Baldwin, in discussing the vexed question as to what i> the criterion by which social phenomena may be discriminated, exam ines the various theories sympathy, compulsion, imitation, etc.- concluding with Professor Giddings' "consciousness of kind," which is characterized as "the climax of descriptive vagueness." The con fusion over criteria is due, in the author's opinion, to a failure to dis- criminate between the material and the method of organization in society. Tarde's theory of imitation offers a theory of the method, but neglects the matter. Professor Baldwin asserts that thoughts are the materials which by the dialectic of personal and of social growth are organized into a sort of collective personality, which is known as society The biological analogy, it is declared, must yield to the psychological : "the organization which is effective in social life is. in all its forms, a psychological organization."