Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/201

 SOCIAL AND ETHICAL INTERPRETATIONS 1 87

environment. " The i'^c? of which we think at any time is not the isolated-and-in-his-body-alone-situated abstraction which our theories of personality usually lead us to think. It is rather a sense of a network of relationships among you, me, and the others, in which certain necessities of pungent feeling, active life, and concrete thought require that I throw the emphasis on one pole sometimes, calling it me, and on the other pole some- times, calling \\. you or him. " After Mr. Baldwin's work we see clearly the meaning in such a definition of psychology as Mr. Stout's : " Psychology is the positive science of mental process," a mental process being one in which certain new adjustments are made out of the preexistent tendencies that make up the natural self ; and the test of consciousness being apparent newness of situation or difficulty of adjustment, there being in reality no line of separation between neural and conscious process. In other words, we rise from a study of Mr. Baldwin's book with a fresh conviction that the point of view of dynamx>genesis — the genetic point of view — is an absolute necessity to anyone who is arriving at clearness and exactitude in his conception of the self, or of consciousness, or of mental process.

It is, I am convinced, only a firm hold of this point of view that enables us to understand the uniqueness of Mr. Baldwin's work. For, to be sure, there is nothing unique in the idea that, as we say, the content of the self is social, or largely social. Plato and Aristotle discovered that, and Bentham and Mr. Leslie Stephen and scores of other people state this truism or platitude in modern phraseology. It is not, however, from the side of content that Mr. Baldwin has insisted on what is common to the self and others, but from the side of form, from the side of personal mental organization : he has shown the necessity of the social dia- lectic to the formal organization of a man's own tendencies to action, or of a man's own self-development and self-knowledge. His book is from first to last psychological in so far as his subject is mental process and its organization ; ofdy, the factor of mental organization whose workings he exhibits to us is a relatively new one — not the well-known ethical self, nor the epistemological self, nor the logical self, nor the metaphysical self, nor the