Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/199

Rh itself a net contribution to the psychology of personality, and an impartial critic of Mr. Baldwin's book would probably confess that what Professor Dewey finds to be the ever-recurring circular process and argument from the self to society and from society to the self, and then back again, is its chief positive result and contention, and not its conspicuous defect. Mr. Dewey finds that Mr. Baldwin first assumes the self on the one hand and society on the other, and then tells us that in our mental development we oscillate and react from the one to the other. While the sense of effort at overcoming difficulties revealed in Mr. Baldwin's argumentation may tend to support this contention, it is hardly a description of the book from its own point of view—the genetic one. Mr. Baldwin does not exactly assume the self and society; he assumes the fact of mental development, studies it in its genesis and growth, and finds that it involves the conception and the reality of the self as a socius, as one term or the other of a common thought or action-content. I am perfectly aware that these dialectical phrases about the self being one term of a relation in a common thought or action-situation have an illusive metaphysical character that is somewhat difficult to manage; yet, if we patiently wait until the end of Mr. Baldwin's investigation, we shall find in his account of the final conflict between the moral man and society an underlying belief in the reality of human personality as something more than mere implication in a social situation or mere conformity to social process.

Nor, to make another point about his genetic method, is Mr. Baldwin merely justified in the conclusion he arrives at from the employment of that method; but he lets us see that he is amply justified in using the genetic method as a method. From his successful exhibition of the fact that organization and system are worked into the personal self only by the "social dialectic," he has shown us that it is impossible to understand the nature of consciousness and conscious process apart from the genetic point of view. I wish to emphasize this point, because it so fully harmonizes with a good deal of important matter that has very recently been put forward, by such writers as Stout and Titchener