Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/318

 displeasure. 2. I place as permanent memorial (e.g.) a stone in my field to remind me that in this place I received important news. 3. I invent a sign, in order that I may recognise something by it, i.e. to remind me that an object stands in a certain relation to me, e.g., is my property. It is thus that I “mark” my animal in the herd; the essential point of my act is the intellectual certainty that I can at any time select it out of the herd as mine. Here the individual significance of the sign easily passes over into an exclusive one, i.e. into a “secret” one. The sign is to be either comprehensible for me alone or perceptible for me alone.

28. To show now how the social will variously presents itself in an analogous way, we will start from the most marked and principal types of its two genera, the concepts of which coincide almost completely with verbally recognised social forces. But at the same time we must make the application to valid meanings of words which are created by such forces.

29. The type of the former category is custom, of the latter law, in the sense in which we think of it as proceeding from deliberations and conclusions of an individual or of an assembly (“statute”-law).

30. The essence of custom lies in actual practice; it corresponds psychologically to what is known in the individual as habit, and it is also called expressly Volksgewohnheit (habit of the people). As will, it is most simply recognisable in the general ill-will, often indeed anger or horror, which is excited by its violation; but also in the forms of speech which proceed from general thought, such as: custom commands, custom demands, custom is strict and inexorable, etc.

31. In languages this view of custom is combined with that of a merely objective activity, of habit as mere usage, i.e., regular usage. But any one knowing the “spirit” of his language will easily note, as by some inward accent, whether custom is being spoken of in the one sense or in the other; just as we can distinguish also an individual application of the word from the social, though in German this is characterised by the plural form and by the fact that it corresponds only to the second and objective application of the social concept (ein Mensch von lockeren Sitten).

32. Synonyms of the word in its social sense are, in German, das Herkommen (tradition), der Brauch (usage); the former expression indicates the foundation of custom through the usage of preceding generations, and the constraining power of that which our fathers have done and