Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/75

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 6 1

and the process. Professor Baldwin spoke for sociology as truly as for psychology when he said :

It is the first requirement of a theory of society that it shall have adequate views of the progress of the social whole, which shall be consistent with the psychology of the individual's personal growth. It is this requirement, I think, which has kept the science of society so long in its infancy; or, at least, this in part. Psychologists have not had sufficient genetic theory to use on their side ; and what theory they had seemed to forbid any attempt to interpret social progress in its categories. As soon as we come to see, however, that the growth of the individual does not forbid this individual's taking part in the larger social movement as well, and, moreover, reach the view that in his growth he is at once also growing into the social whole, and in so far aiding its further evolution then we seem to have found a bridge on which it is safe to travel and from which we can get vistas of the country on both sides. 1

In this connection we may adopt another remark of Professor Baldwin : 2

.... one of the historical conceptions of man is, in its social aspects, mistaken. Man is not a person who stands up in his isolated majesty, mean- ness, passion, or humility, and sees, hits, worships, fights, or overcomes another man, who does the opposite things to him, each preserving his isolated maj- esty, meanness, passion, humility, all the while, so that he can be considered a " unit" for the compounding processes of social speculation. On the contrary, a man is a social outcome rather than a social unit. He is always, in his greatest part, also someone else. Social acts of his that is, acts which may not prove anti-social are his because they are society 's first ; otherwise he would not have learned them nor have had any tendency to do them. Every- thing that he learns is copied, reproduced, assimilated from his fellows ; and what all of them, including him all the fellows, the socii do and think, they do and think because they have each been through the same course of copying, reproducing, assimilating that he has. When he acts quite privately it is always with a boomerang in his hand ; and every use he makes of his weapon leaves its indelible impression both upon the other and upon him.

It is on such truths as these, which recent writers have been bringing to light, 3 that the philosophy of society must be gradually built up. Only the neglect of such facts can account for the present state of social discussion. Once let it be our philosophical conviction, drawn from the more general results of psychology and anthropology, that man is not two, an ego and an alter, each of which is in active and chronic protest against a third great thing, society ; once dispel this hideous un-fact, and with it the remedies found by the egoists, back all the way from the Spencers to the Hobbeses and the


 * Social and Ethical Interpretations, p. 8l.

'Idem, p. 87. 3 Stephen, S. Alexander, Hoffding, Tarde.

\