Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/832

 8l2 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

which constitutes the group a functional unity. This acting together of the individual organisms in a group evidently cor- responds in form exactly to the coordination in the individual. We may call it, therefore, the group or social coordination.' It is in group-life what the coordination is in the individual organ- ism — the unit of psychical activity, the fundamental psychical fact about which all other facts of psychical activity group them- selves. As in the case of the individual, too, particular social coordinations become unified into a general life-process of the group, which we term the social process. The origin of group- acts or coordinations among primitive forms may be explained on biological grounds ; but the group-act or coordination is none the less the first psychic manifestation of group-life. It is accord- ingly the fact upon which social psychology must be built up, and from which it must proceed in functionally interpreting the life of society. The fundamental fact in social psychology is, therefore, the social coordination.

While the social coordination may be objectively defined as the acting together of the individual organisms of a group in some particular way, subjectively it doubtless always involves, where consciousness exists, a certain psychical attitude of the individual members of the group toward each other. At least in so far as concerns human society, the social coordination may be subjectively defined as the mental attitude which the individ- uals of a group maintain toward each other. Thus in a family group the mental attitude of its members toward each other is an expression of their common group-life and group-activities, and may be expected to change as those activities change. It is evident that we have here to do with the beginnings of social organization. The acting together of the individual organisms

' Of course, from one point of view, the group-act, or "social coordination," is but a continuation, an extension, a result, of the acts of the individual members of the group. This point of view is in no way inconsistent with that generally maintained in this paper. We can either look at the group as a whole, or regard it as composed of individual elements. Both points of view are necessary for the full understanding of group-life. The former has been generally maintained by the writer, for the sake of simplicity, though the latter has also occasionally been taken. There is no dualism implied here between the individual and the group ; nor elsewhere in the paper, if the argument is properly apprehended.