Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/197

 SOCIAL AND ETHICAL INTERPRETATIONS 1 83

arising out of a common or identical thought-content or action- content — has already been accepted as a fact by the sociolo- gists, and may be found doing duty under its own technical appellation (the "socius ") in the recent manual by Professor Giddings, of Columbia, called the Elements of Sociology. And the second — that society is a "psychological organization" — fits on, as a kind of coping-stone marked with the imprimatur of a master- worker in the realm of mind, to the edifice that French and American sociologists have in the last ten years erected on the ruins of the biological sociology of the preceding two decades. Mr. Baldwin has thus done at least two things, either one of which would give him a place in the annals of scientific progress — shown, in the first place, with greater completeness and greater exactitude than any recent psychologist, the part played by social contact, by social action and reaction, in the mental develop- ment of the individual ; and shown, in the second place, the broad and deep psychological foundations of the greatest idea of this century, an idea that has a great role to play in the next century — the idea, namely, that the progress of society depends upon psychological factors.

Unlike Professor Dewey," I must confess to having received, from even a first perusal, the impression that Mr. Baldwin's book did actually, from its author's point of view, achieve the object of his endeavors ; the exhibition, to-wit, of social organization and personal mental org-anization under the same psychological principles, the principles of imitation and generalization, of habit and accommodation, and so on. I did find it somewhat long and somewhat unduly discursive and lacking in symmetry and pro- portion, but I attributed these defects to the fact of its being an investigative and pioneer essay rather than a didactic treatise. One of the first things about it that please is its classical recog- nition (for after recent articles by Professors Titchener and Miinsterberg we may call this very recognition classical and imperative) of epistemological principles, that is, self-imposed strictures about method and subject-matter. With Mr. Baldwin

'See Philosophical Review for November, 1898, "Discussion" by Professors Baldwin and Dewey ; also New World for October, 1898.