Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/119

 PROLEGOMENA TO SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 105

We have styled social psychology the science of the mechan- ism or technique of socio-psychical processes. Just as individ- ual psychology does not investigate directly the psychical ele- ments of individual consciousness, but rather the mechanism of psychical processes, so the task of social psychology is to examine, not public opinion, language, customs, institutions, and the like, as products of the collective psychical life, but the mechanism of the socio-psychical processes through which these products arise and change. This is no arbitrary limitation of the field of social psychology, but a necessity. Just as it has been found in individual psychology that only the mechanism of psychical processes can be reduced to scientific formulation, so it will be found in social psychology. The work of the latter, then, is the formulation of the method of socio-psychical pro- cesses. If it be asked with what portion of the psychical nature of the individual social psychology will particularly deal, when the group is regarded as constituted of individual elements rather than as a unity, the answer is, with the instinctive, impul- sive, affective side of the individual. The reason for this reply is plain. The intellectual side of the individual represents the choice of means and, therefore, can be, without danger to the group, individual ; but the impulsive, affective side represents the choice of ends, and, therefore, must be, and is, organized more fully into the life of the group. The impulsive, habitual, emo- tional side of the life of the individual, in other words, is nor- mally submerged, as it were, in the life of his group ; while the rational, cognitive side is left freer and so is more peculiarly individual. Social psychology, accordingly, will deal especially with the former, in so far as it considers the individual as an element in the social whole ; and while it may not encroach upon the field of individual psychology in its consideration of the impulsive, affective side of the individual, it is just here that an enrichment of the latter science may be expected from the devel- opment of a social psychology.

We do not shrink from stating and defending the parallel- ism between the individual and society which has been freely implied throughout the argument of this series of papers. The