Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/198

 l84 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

himself, I think that Professor Dewey's criticism and discussion of Social and Ethical Interpretations, important as it is from the point of view of the reorganization in several of our leading psycho- logical conceptions involved by the essay, tends very largely to overlook its professed point of view. Mr. Baldwin distinguishes carefully both his method and his matter from the method and matter of other psychologists, and would be the first to denounce the idea that he is to be held responsible for initial definite con- ceptions about the nature of personality (a thing that Professor Dewey finds to be sadly lacking), or the nature of mind and mental processes. Questions " about the nature of mind," he has told us in his first volume, and in his second too, are largely independent of questions of origin. If Mr. Baldwin is, perhaps, somewhat more dogmatic about his contention that society is a " psychological organization," seeming by this very dogmatism to be speaking rather as a sociologist than a psychologist, we must bear in mind, what many of us know to be a fact, that the provinces of sociology and psychology for the present actually overlap, and almost coincide as to their common effort and desire to find the psychological basis for the phenomena of social organization and social progress, and that the sub-title of Mr. Baldwin's book informs us that it is a study in social psychology.

Mr. Baldwin's point of view is genetic, the form of that method which (to use his own words) "inquires into the psycho- logical development of the human individual in the earlier stages of his growth for light upon his social nature, and also upon the social organization in which he bears a part." In regard to this point of view, we ought, I think, to congratulate ourselves upon the successful employment to which it has been put by our author, and upon the extent to which he has enriched positive psychology by his observations and experiments. It is only natural, perhaps, that the genetic method should have led to the conclusion that the reality of the self consists in process and progress rather than stable equilibrium or peculiarity of personal content, but this is a result to which everything in post-Kantian philosophy and psychology that has followed the lead of Scho- penhauer rather than that of Herbart has been tending. It is