Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/235

 PROLEGOMENA TO SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 221

an unhappy one in many ways, as it tends to express too much, but a better one has unfortunately not yet been found. Let us see in the light of our past reasoning what content it can be given, and what the probable facts are which it is meant to cover.

The old-time individualist, as we have already hinted, has an easy way of disposing of the concept of the social mind. Accord- ing to him, every man stands, as it were, upon a pedestal of his own. The individual is isolated, is unconnected with his fellows, save in a mechanical way. Even communication is regarded, either as quite inexplicable, or as a sort of semi-mechanical pro- cess by which ideas are converted into signs and transferred in some mysterious way from one mind to another. The psychical life of the individual is left by individualism, in a word, far more an unconnected fact than his physiological life. To anyone with such a bias the concept of a social mind, whatever content it be given, must appear as nonsense. But philosophical individual- ism, even in its modified forms, is as much an anachronism in the light of modern science, especially modern anthropology and ethnology, as the theory of special creation is in biology. Not only the form, but also largely the content of the psychical life of the individual has been shown to be due to his member- ship in his group, to the fact that he is a functioning element in a larger functional whole. The special creationist and the individualist may each persist in his theory, but neither can longer influence the tide of thought.

At the opposite extreme from individualism we find a theory equally unjustified by the facts. This is a curious mixture of mysticism and the mediaeval logical realism, according to which the social mind is an entity distinct from and above the minds of individuals. Like the "soul" of mediaeval philosophy the social mind is conceived of as a mysterious entity, which has a life of its own, independent of individual lives, yet in some way ruling or overruling the latter. Whether anyone ever seriously held such a theory in recent times may be doubted, but it is practically the theory which has been imputed to many of the pioneers in the field of social psychology. The mere statement of the theory is sufficient to indicate its absurdity, and likewise