Page:Philosophical Review Volume 26.djvu/46

34 from Sumner especially, embodied in the mores the repetition or time factor, the group factor, and the welfare factor. But as Sumner goes on with his heaping up of instances of mores we can but feel that the greatest of the above three is the group.

The conception of the group has compelled a restatement of the conception of the individual. This was initiated to be sure from several more or less independent lines of thought. James's brilliant chapter on the self, just preceding our period, was apparently suggested by psychological rather than sociological interests. But in the wealth of material from European and American writers which has directed our attention to the social self, or to the racial self, or to the dialectic of personal growth, or to the processes of imitation and suggestion, or to the stock of instincts, or to the philosophy of loyalty, we find sociological interests and concepts playing a strong and often a dominating role. The individual has been declared to be a social outcome rather than a social unit. In fact we might draw a parallel between the change that has been taking place recently in the conception of the self and the change effected by Kant. For in place of the soul as simple substance affirmed by rationalism and discredited by Hume, Kant set the conception of an active agency which comes into being as it organizes its experience. It is a synthetic unity. The self of social psychology is similarly born in the process of defining relation to other selves. Only the peculiar stimulus that comes from persons evokes the peculiar responses that enter as integrant factors into growing personality.

The ethical implications of this view of the self have partially been exploited. Baldwin's Social and Ethical Interpretations, Royce's Philosophy of Loyalty, Westermarck's Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, Sumner's Folkways are enough to show how important a reconstruction has been going on. Older puzzles as to obligation, as to egoism and altruism, as to innate and acquired principles, as to intuitions and moral sense, can no longer be stated to say nothing of being solved by the older formulas. "Reason" is still relied upon by some as a category exempt from the need of reconstruction in the light of social psychology, but as I have tried to show elsewhere this is because