Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/362

 348 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

It seems probable that the correspondences here pointed out by Professor Baldwin do actually exist, but he has not carried us forward to a more critical and fundamental distinction in the psychology both of the man and the race. This is the distinction between empirical thinking in terms of concrete wholes and abstract reasoning based on analysis of essential attributes, which is, of course, a prime distinction made by psychologists. It is incumbent upon the sociologist to locate the corresponding distinction in race psychology and to unfold the social cause of the transition from the lower to the higher.

Psychologists contrast these two modes of thinking as pre- dominantly association by contiguity and association by simi- larity. The one is habitual "unconscious" inference, the other is voluntary analysis with the express purpose of making new classifications of the material of experience. " Empirical thought associates phenomena in their entirety, but reasoned thought couples them by the conscious intentional use of a particular partial aspect which has been extracted from the whole."' A more definitely sociological psychology would place greater emphasis on the difference in the processes of the two modes of thinking. Empirical thinking is imitative, traditional, customary, habitual. If it originates anything new, it is only by adding here and there to the old and familiar what has been accidentally hit upon in mere routine experience. In this way grew up primitive products, inventions, and institutions by a " natural " evolution, a process which M. Tarde' designates as "accumulation," though not pointing out its psychic basis.

Reflective thinking, on" the other hand, is skeptical, critical, introspective, individualistic, at first iconoclastic, later inventive and constructive. It seeks "essential attributes," analyzes the accepted traditions, institutions, and products of the time, in order to discover either the fundamental laws and purposes which govern their making, or those attributes which in fundamental ways enable the thinker to reclassify and reorganize the material of experience Invention here may displace the old altogether or recombine it in unthought-of ways, and progress leaps forward

'James. ^ Lis Lois de V Imitation, f^. i88 ff.