Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/428

 414 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

statics "assumes the fixity of human institutions in order to study them, abstracts for the moment the idea of movement or change, and deals with society at a given point of time. It takes, as it were, an instantaneous photograph" (p. 224). How, then, can he make such statements as have been quoted above, if this static character is a mere methodological abstraction and not the real fact concerning the phe- nomena? If social statics represents this abstraction, then social statics should rest on social dynamics, and not the reverse, as he con- tends. An application of this point of view would save him also from the very great difficulties which he unnecessarily creates for himself by his arbitrary separation of biological function, individual feeling, and social action (or achievement). It would prevent his artificial separa- tion of means and ends, of dynamic force and directive agent. What he calls telesis must have been present from the first in what he calls genesis.

Finally, we come to what is in some respects the most important psychological conception in the book, because of its relations to sociology that of the place of the psychical individual in social achievement. The fundamental law is that in organic evolution the environment transforms the organism, whereas in the socialization of achievement man transforms the environment (p. 254). The medium of this transformation is mind, consciousness, reason, the psychic. The instrument of progress is strictly individualistic (p. 545). "Social genesis is secured through individual telesis" (p. 545). "The initia- tive is almost exclusively individual and the ends sought are egocentric. The social consequences are .... unconscious." The really social nature of individual consciousness and the important function of the individual in the reconstruction of (social) experience are vaguely assumed throughout the book. This is perhaps the most important question at the present time in both psychology and sociology the relation between the social process of evolution as a whole and the psychic process which takes place in the individual consciousness. In certain passages this function of the individual in the reorganization of social experience is worked out in a very suggestive way. Yet here, too, an inadequate psychology precludes any satisfactory statement of the principle.

"The phenomenon is psychic" (p. 243). This is the peculiar function of the "directive agent," of "telesis." An example is found in the inventive genius. " What the inventor does is to discover the principle This discovery, and not the resulting material prod- uct, is the lasting element in the operation" (p. 29). The author