Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/836

 8l6 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

societary activity, a social habit, which has been of such life- saving advantage to the group that the authority and sanction of the group as a whole have been conferred upon it. Laws are formal expressions of social habits which have come into con- sciousness. They are established by the group for the sake of greater control over the habit. Nearly the same thing may be said of ethical rules which have been approved by the group. Habit, then, is a category which applies to societary as well as to individual life. It is a fundamental category in interpreting the psychical life of society, if that interpretation proceeds from a functional point of view.

With the idea of transition as applied to social life we are already familiar. In the terminology of social psychology a social transition is obviously a transition from one social habit to another, from one social coordination to another. In the face of new life-conditions social habits, like individual habits, must be readjusted. In other words, the old social coordination breaks down and the phenomenon of adaptation, of building up a new social coordination, arises. It is here that some of the most important of societary phenomena come in. Where processes of discrimination, association, and attention in the individual aid in building up a new coordination, processes of discussion, social suggestion, and social selection in the group come in to con- struct the new social coordination. The process of discussion, which may be called the societary process of discrimination, represents especially the breakdown of the old social coordination, while the processes of social suggestion and social selection particularly represent the building up of the new coordination. In human society, at least, all these processes may arise in the transition from one coordination to another, that is, in the adapta- tion of the group life-process to some new condition in either the external or the internal environment. Adaptation,' then, is a fact of group-life as well as of individual life, and next to coordination the most fundamental and important fact.

Thus in theory the categories and principles of a functional psychology of the individual seem to apply in a subjective inter-

' Or accommodation, as Professor Baldwin would prefer to say.