Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/755

 THEORY OF IMITA TION IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 74!

Social psychology must keep close to life if it is truly to interpret life. Its standpoint must be one of function that of a developing life-process. The "interdependence of function," which begins in the biological and ends in the ethical stage of human development, is the fundamental fact of all socio- psychological phenomena. The working unities which organisms formed, at first unconsciously, but finally consciously and pur- posefully, to sustain and develop the life-process, have alone made possible the development of that intercerebral process which in humanity we rightly term, by way of preeminence, the social process. The coordination of functioning activities into working unities larger than the individual organism, 1 then, viewed in the light of evolution, explains all socio-psychical phenomena, including suggestion, imitation, consciousness of kind, and the like. Upon this basis a deeper interpretation of the social process which shall reconcile the conflicting theories of the present seems to us possible; while the recognition of the working unity, "the social coordination," as the fundamental fact with which it deals, should make social psychology at once concrete and practical.

CHARLES A. ELLWOOD. THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI.

1 See the writer's paper on " The Fundamental Fact in Social Psychology," in the AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, May, 1899.