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 SOCIAL AND ETHICAL INTERPRETATIONS OF MENTAL DEVELOPMENT.'

The contents and main results of Professor Baldwin's book, Social and Ethical Interpretations of Mental Development, are now, doubtless, so familiar to students of social and philosophical questions that it is needless for me to give any detailed account or analysis of it. The bulk of it is taken up with the attempt to show that the "principles of the development of the individual apply also to the evolution of society." It maintains that the organization of the knowledge, of the conduct, of the ideals, of the individual person is effected not "exclusively by private tests," but by a kind of social dialectic, a process of "take and give" and "give and take" between his social environment and him- self, by a process of imitation and successful invention on the basis of " social heredity" and enforced adaptation to changes in the environment. Then, in the second place, that the "general fact of human social organization" may be conceived in the very psychological terms and principles that characterize the process of personal mental organization — that, in other words, the "so-called dialectic whereby the child comes to a knowledge of himself by building up a sense of his social enviromnent, may also be looked at from the side of social organization ;" that, in short, the mental and moral organization of the individual, and social organization itself, may and can be explained by the same psychological principles. The results of the book are manifold, and I shall below refer to some of them in detail. The two chief results seem to have assumed, by general acclamation, places that were waiting for them in the constructions of contemporary science. The first one — -that the self must be conceived as a "socius," as a bipolar unity, as either term of an antithesis, as an ego or an alter, as one term or end of a personal relation

' Read before the American Psychological Association, New York, December 30, l»98.

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