Page:Philosophical Review Volume 27.djvu/212

200 ever-widening community, the 'realization' of social interests beyond the limits of politically independent groups. Society widens and a sense of community grows." Such a distinction between community and State is obviously of prime importance for a proper understanding of international relations, since upon the assumption of the identity of the two "we have no social unity among the nations until they are absorbed within a world state." The author points us away from the dangerous illusion of a monistic world state, holding us to a pluralism (federation) of political unities that is embosomed in the wider interrelationship of world community.

Again Dr. McIver falls in with the strong tendency of modern philosophical and political thinking in his vigorous handling of certain social and political abstractions that have passed for statements of fact. The chief and captain of them, that society is more than its members, he shows to be nothing less than a revival of the Middle Age realistic notion that the type exists by itself. Again, the abstraction is reached by a subtle process of hypostatizing relations. We come to think of social relations as literally ties—somehow outside the beings they bind together—and of 'society' therefore as that which is persons plus relations. As a matter of fact "the ties exist in the personality of each and there alone." Closely allied to this society-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-members abstraction is the organic abstraction. It is "an analogy," says Dr. McIver, "which has wrought harm not only in the study of general sociology, but in ethics, politics, psychology and economics as well." He proceeds to dispose of the analogy with a frank directness that is refreshing when one remembers how sociologists and social philosophers, awed by the looming shadows of past worthies, have stuttered and stumbled in their effort to adjust themselves to its claims. "There is one essential difference between a community and an organism which destroys all real analogy. An organism is or has according as we interpret it a single center, a unity, a life, a purpose or consciousness which is no purpose or consciousness of the several parts but only of the whole. A community consists of a myriad centers of life and consciousness, of true autonomous individuals who are merged in no such corporate unity, whose purposes are lost in no such corporate purpose."

Proceeding, he disposes of the mischievous abstraction of the 'social mind.' 'Community' is no greater mind, but is created by that activity of men's minds in which they relate themselves incessantly to one another. "Shall we ever," he sighs, "learn to study society directly in itself and not in the distorting mirror of analogy?"