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 278 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

person we wish to possess or master appears to us as striving to master us and use us for his own ends then a second step has been taken, as significant as the former. These are marvelous phenomena of psychic symmetry, like that of two mirrors which reflect each other and so give to each other the mutual illusion of infinite depth.

Elementary inter-mental action has been thoroughly studied, on its abnormal and pathological sides, by the hypnotists; and they may be regarded as the earliest founders of inter-psychology. Alienists and criminologists, who have produced such interested monographs on double insanity, and double suicide or crime, have also made exact contributions toward elucidating this fundamental problem. Studies on timidity, and especially those on crowds, have also been valuable contributions. But it is essential that we give them their place in the outlines of a psychology of the sane and normal, and these outlines we must first lay down.

Inter-psychology has its own divisions and methods. From the genetic point of view, it begins with the study of the infant from the time of its first mental relations with people about it ; and the evolution from this inter-psycholcgy of the infant to that of adults is of the highest social interest. From the theoretic and general point of view, we should study in the abstract, and separately, the action of sense-impressions upon sense-impressions, or of will upon will, and of intelligence upon intelligence. It is to be noted in this connection that sensations, and the concepts of sensations, are by no means communicable as such ; but only ideas, plans, beliefs, and desires. Feelings are to inter-psychology what sensations are to the psychology of the indi- vidual. Sensations are a tangled skein, complex and confused, which the individual brain unravels as best it may, and from which it draws its ideas of space, time, matter, and force not to mention the antithesis of pleasure and pain. Feelings are another skein, far more complex and richer yet, which the life of society both produces and disentangles, and from which it draws the social categories of right and duty, as well as the great antithesis of good and evil. Feelings are signs of our social relationships, just as sensations are signs of our physical relationships with natural agents. Three questions arise : first, why some feelings are or are not propagated in a given environment, at a given moment ; second, how they are propagated, and by what methods ; third, the transformations they undergo in the process. GABRIEL TARDE, " Inter-Psychology, the Inter-Play of Human Minds," in International Quarterly, Vol. VII, No. I.

A. D. S.

Religions and Their Social ROle. There is a certain temerity in subjecting religions to the scientific method of study. But it is difficult to see why such a method should not be faithfully employed in so great a subject, especially when we are in possession of a large and accurately dated body of knowledge on the great religions, their principles and practices. We purpose to study the Hebrew-Christian religion it being the prevailing religion in the most advanced civilization with special reference to the social organization accompanying it. What part has the religious factor had in determining the contemporaneous social order ? Let us go back to the early history of the Jewish religion. This religion was in its strength about four centuries before the Christian era among a small people in a mountainous country between Syria and Egypt. Previous to the fourth century B. C. this religion seems to have been a sort of mixture of the cults of the neighboring tribes. It had many gods, but there was one patron god, a chief, Jehovah.

After every hope of a national existence had been cut off by the captivity of 586 B. C., the Jews had the extraordinary chance of renewing their existence under the form of a religious group at the time of the restoration under Ezra and Nehemiah. Then was established the religion that for so many centuries was destined to dominate in the civilized nations. This Judaism, greatly modified by the Christian element grafted upon it, is the point of departure for the religious history of civilization.

What has been the social role of Judaism ? What its political significance ? The object of religion is not social progress, though it must be inseparably united to this. Has this Judaism-Christianity respected the rignts of the citizen and the government of the state ? Has it encouraged the progress of science and education? Has the religious man been interested in all movements of moral betterment ? The great ancient states, Sparta, Athens, and pagan Rome, non-Christian states, respected