Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/121

 PROLEGOMENA TO SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 107

but social groups present no such unified consciousness. In them consciousness is discrete, resident in the individual ele- ments, not in a specially differentiated organ. They are, struc- turally, then, of a much lower type than their individual elements. A socio-psychical process is possible only through the psychical interaction of the individual elements. The unitv of the socio- psychical process, therefore, is almost purely a functional one. The failure to perceive clearly this truth and its implication, that the parallelism between the psychical life of the individual and that of society is almost wholly on the functional side, has been, in our estimation, the cause of much of the unreality and seem- ing absurdity of many attempted social psychologies in the past.

In all that has just been said the organic nature of society is plainly implied. The psychical parallelism asserted between the individual and the social group may, indeed, from one point of view, be regarded as a corollary of the theory that the social group is an organism. We are evidently, then, under the bur- den of defending the organic theory of society. Just at present this theory is in disrepute, perhaps justly so, because of the absurd extremes to which it has been carried by some of its sup- porters. But that society is an organism, in the broad sense of that term, no one who has examined all the facts in the case can reasonably doubt. The organic nature of the societarv life is as much a fact as the chemical nature of physiological processes, and is just as demonstrable. Properly understood, the proposi- tion should be indeed self-evident. The arguments in fa\'or of this view have been ably stated by several writers,' and need not be repeated here ; but one or two points may be noted. One is the well-known biological fact that the tendency of living mat- ter is to assume functional, and so organic, relations with other living matter with which it comes into contact. Probably it was thus that multicellular forms arose from the original unicellular forms. Now, it would seem that this principle would continue to act in the case of multicellular forms coming into more or less functional contact with each other through living together in groups. We should expect the individuals of the group to become organically related among themselves, and the group as

' See especially Mackenzie's Inlroductioti to Social P/iihsop/iy, chap. iii.