Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/203

 SOCIAL AND ETHICAL INTERPRETATIONS I 89

tend, by virtue of that expansive reaction-movement which is characteristic of all living beings, to reinstate or repeat them- selves in our psycho-physical organism. Imitation, in short, to Mr. Baldwin seems to denote the quasi-c\x cwXdiX character of the action and reaction-process that continually goes on between man and his social environment. To Mr. Dewey it is rather an effect than a cmise of social development, and to others it is onlv one of many factors in social development. There are, as we know, classical precedents in French and American writers for its use as the social process par excellence, but perhaps it would be fairer to Mr. Baldwin to say about him — not that he is another advocate for the imitation theory of social progress, but that he is a psychologist who has shown us what must be comprised under imitation, if we would take it (for want of a better word or conception) to describe that assimilation of the action-suggestions of individuals by society, which is no doubt a fact and a necessary means of social progress. If we think of how the world assimilated the teaching of a Socrates, or of Christ, or of a Darwin ; of how it generally does assimilate, first the external characteristics, and then the actions, and the points of view of great men and their methods of "going to work," we shall perhaps agree that it is the only way by which the world in general appropriates the thoughts of individuals — the matter that, according to Mr. Baldwin, constitutes the chief matter of social organization.

This very idea that thought \s the chief matter of social organi- zation, and that consequently society may be regarded as a psy- chological organization, has today, after the many years of our devotion to evolutionary philosophy, such a bold and novel char- acter that it naturally rivets the attention of all readers and crit- ics of the volume. It is a proof of Mr. Dewey's breadth and candor of mind that he refuses to accept without criticism an idea which will of course be so welcome and so gratifying to all idealists and to the social philosophy of idealism. It is/(?(?good, as it were, to be true. The matter or the material of social organi- zation is not thoughts, it seems, but men — men and women and their activities, and such aggregations or organic groups of