Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/215

THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 20$ brick is as much a brick when it is dropped and forgotten on the way from the kiln to the building as the other bricks that are set in the wall. It is not a part of a structure, but it has all its individual characteristics independent of other bricks. A brick, qua brick, is not a social phenomenon. A person, on the contrary, cannot come into physical existence except through the co-operation of parent persons; he cannot become a self-sustaining animal unless protected for several years by other persons; and he cannot find out and exercise his capabilities unless stimulated to countless forms of action by contact with other persons. The personal units in society, then, are units that in countless ways depend upon each other for possession of their own personality. They find themselves in each other. They continually seek each other. They perpetually realize themselves by means of each other.

We might go on to show that mere consciousness itself is, to a considerable degree, an affair not of an assumed individual, existing like a brick, unrelated to other bricks, and not dependent upon other bricks for its characteristics. Consciousness in itself, or at least self-consciousness, is not an individual but a social phenomenon. We do not arrive at self-consciousness except by coming into circuit with other persons, with whom we achieve awareness of ourselves. For sociological purposes this degree of refinement is unnecessary. We need to know simply that persons do not enlarge and equip and enrich and exercise their personality except by maintaining relations with other persons. Even Robinson Crusoe kept up a one-sided connection with society. If, when he walked out of the surf to the shore, he had left behind him the mental habits, the language, the ideas which he had amassed in contact with other persons, not enough available means of correlating his actions would have remained to provide him with his first meal.

It must be observed, further, that these considerations are not mere pedantic generalities. Some of the most intensely practical public questions of the present and the immediate future go back to premises involved in the foregoing. Some of the