Social organization

SOCIAL ORGANIZATION
BOOKS BY CHARLES HORTON COOLEY PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
BY CHARLES HORTON COOLEY PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN AUTHOR OF “HUMAN NATURE AND THE SOCIAL ORDER” NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 1911
Copyright, 1909, by CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published April, 1909
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED To E. J. C. WHOSE INFLUENCE IS A CHIEF SOURCE OF ANY LITERARY MERIT IT MAY HAVE
Our life is all one human whole, and if we are to have any real knowledge of it we must see it as such. If we cut it up it dies in the process: and so I conceive that the various branches of research that deal with this whole are properly distinguished by change in the point of sight rather than by any division in the thing that is seen. Accordingly, in a former book (Human Nature and Social Order), I tried to see society as it exists in the social nature of man and to display that in its main outlines. In this one the eye is focussed on the enlargement and diversification of intercourse which I have called Social Organization, the individual, though visible, remaining slightly in the background.
It will be seen from my title and all my treatment that I apprehend the subject on the mental rather than the material side. I by no means, however, overlook or wish to depreciate the latter, to which I am willing to ascribe all the importance that any one can require for it. Our task as students of society is a large one, and each of us, I suppose, may undertake any part of it to which he feels at all competent.
Ann Arbor, Mich., February, 1909 .
SOCIAL ORGANIZATION
Mind an Organic Whole—Conscious and Unconscious Relations—Does Self-Consciousness Come First? Cogito, Ergo Sum—The Larger Introspection—Self-Consciousness in Children—Public Consciousness.
Mind is an organic whole made up of coöperating individualities, in somewhat the same way that the music of an orchestra is made up of divergent but related sounds. No one would think it necessary or reasonable to divide the music into two kinds, that made by the whole and that of particular instruments, and no more are there two kinds of mind, the social mind and the individual mind. When we study the social mind we merely fix our attention on larger aspects and relations rather than on the narrower ones of ordinary psychology.