Page:Philosophical Review Volume 6.djvu/462

446 the author makes contributions, as new as they are interesting, to the psychology of the child, and proves himself the same skilful observer in finding identical or analogous movements in different phases of conscious life. A fundamental idea, which he seeks to establish by the aid of the genetic method, is that there exists a correspondence and constant relation between the purely individual part of the consciousness of a person and the part which develops under the influence of society. From the start, the conception which the individual forms of his ego is made after the pattern of what he learns of others, or what he adopts from others by imitation; and the conceptions thus formed come in their turn to determine the conceptions which he forms of others and the expectation which he entertains of them. Or, to employ the terminology of the author, there exists a certain reciprocity, or constant circulation, setting out from the 'project' (the conception suggested by the behavior of the 'other') and proceeding to the 'subject' (the conception which the individual has of himself), and from that in turn to the 'eject' (the new thought or expectation in regard to the 'other'), and vice versa. It is by this process, notably through the influence of the 'project,' that what the author calls 'social heredity' comes into operation. It is only when aided and corroborated by social heredity, that the tendencies of physical heredity are able to influence in an important way the development of the individual. The individual is a product of society rather than a social unit. Yet this is only one side of the truth, as the writer goes on to show. For the individual never remains passive under the action of the suggestions and impulsions of the social environment. It is not that the project is simply converted into the subject, and the subject into the eject. What the individual adopts he makes over into different interpretations and combinations: social heredity is particularized. Invention accompanies imitation; sometimes the one predominates, sometimes the other; and in this respect there are great differences among individuals. When the mind passes on from the project and the subject to the eject, it always has need of putting to proof the new combinations or particularizations in their relation to actual experience. The project may be imposed as ideal upon the subject, and the subject in its turn, with its private particularization, as ideal upon the eject; and it is through this relation that moral conflicts are rendered possible.

"By this psychological analysis the author prepares himself to treat in detail the question proposed. In the examination of society, with a view to discovering and determining its relation to the individual, he finds that social organizations themselves are forms and accumulations of the work of individuals. It is not correct, then, from the outset, to make a fundamental opposition between the individual and society. We have to distinguish, he says, two sorts of social forces: the one is implicated in the organization of the social body (the laws, customs, manners, and institutions of society); the other manifests itself in the particularizing and combining activity of the individual—an activity which exists in all degrees from the idiot to the