Page:Philosophical Review Volume 20.djvu/678

664 rests on schemata, on processes of experimentation, on hypotheses or proposals suggested by the imagination. Society pares down and refines the novelties suggested by original minds and thus gives them entrance into the domain of the socially selected and accepted; "then the individuals of successive generations receive them by social inheritance and reinforce them in turn" (p. 155). Whatever tends to disturb this concurrence of the individualistic and collectivistic factors, "this oneness of ideal and aim, marks retrogression, since it tends to mutilate the individual by separating him from 'the social body, or to destroy society by depriving it of its original minds" (p. 156). In conclusion, Chapter VII outlines the various problems which divide Social Science into its various fields, an account based on the article "Social Science" in the author's Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology.

Thus, Professor Baldwin has presented in an interesting and suggestive way the important truth that society and the individual are not two separate forces that make "grudging concessions each to the other," but "two sides of a growing organic whole, in which the welfare and advance of the one ministers to the welfare and progress of the other" (p. 170). This itself, however, implies the fallacy of the contention, referred to above, that there is "a sphere of direct competition, a struggle for existence, between groups of individuals, communities, states, etc., and war is its most evident method of settlement" (p. 115). There can be no hard and fast line between groups of individuals any more than between one individual and other individuals or society in general. The principle of rationality and of self-consciousness is a principle of universality. It was just by shutting himself up against the outside world in his self-sufficiency, that the Stoic came to recognize that he was a citizen of the world; and just in so far as Christian and Buddhist attained to a knowledge of the self, were they led to see that all men are kin and that war, therefore, is at best a form of suicide. Environment, geography, need for food, etc., must be reckoned with in the interpretation of social phenomena and of the facts of human history, but such factors, or the struggle for existence, are inadequate for our understanding of the relations, not only of individuals, but also of groups of individuals. Underlying all such relations, including war, are, I dare say, such psychological motives as religion, honor, ambition, revenge, and self-enlargement.

Professor Baldwin has also done well again to insist on the unique character of the self and the 'socius.' The self is not an object among other objects or society, a compound composed of such atoms or elements; nor can the self properly be conceived as analogous to a living cell or society as an organism. Almost a century ago, Hegel insisted that society could be adequately interpreted only by transcending the principles of natural and of biological science and employing the categories of cognition, volition, and self-consciousness. And yet the very persons who have been freest in the use of the epithets 'a priori' and 'mere speculation' have, in coming to the social sciences from their more familiar fields of physics, mechanics, chemistry, and biology, introduced such terms as 'static,' 'dynamic,' 'equilibrium,' 'adaptation,' '