Consciousness is aroused in the individual, and new activities result, which soon, however, lose their conscious character, and become reflex and automatic. So with society.
Then follows an elaborate analogy between the individual brain and nervous system and their functions, and the social structure and its functions, which we need not reproduce here. This analogy seems forced to me. There is little point to trying to find such exact correspondences. It is enough if we have our general organic principle as a method of study, and then proceed to the study of social facts. I shall myself, however, make use of some analogies in what follows, but shall not insist too strongly upon them. I may here express the opinion that society is an organism less highly developed than a man's body or a man's mind, and that its unity is primarily a unity of function rather than of structure,[107] though there is some structural unity.
The conception of the social unity which seems most useful for the purpose of our study—and the writer would insist that no social theory is valid for all purposes, and that many social theories have value for some particular purposes—is that of Professor C. H. Cooley, as set forth, particularly, in the opening chapters of his Social Organization. As this book, however, presupposes certain doctrines set forth in Professor Cooley's earlier book, Human Nature and the Social Order, a brief account of certain points in that study must also be given. It may be noted, at the outset, that Professor Cooley neglects the study of the material aspects of society, and centres his attention upon the mental side. His purpose in this is not to deny the significance of the material factors, as he explains in the preface to Social Organization, but simply to narrow the scope of his labors. The writer wishes here to make a similar statement regarding his own viewpoint. In the following pages, attention will be centred almost exclusively upon the psychical forces involved, upon what we shall call the "social mind." In this, however, it is explicitly recognized that the physical environment and the biological individuals are essential factors, and that the forces which are manifested in them must be recognized as coefficients with the psychical forces which we shall study, in the determination of any concrete social situation. I have no intention whatever of giving an independent, ontological character to this psychical abstraction. For the purposes of this study we shall regard the physical factors as constant,—an assumption justified for purposes of study, provided we subsequently, in handling concrete problems, make allowance for the extent to which it is untrue.
In his earlier book,[108] Professor Cooley objects to the customary antithesis between "individual" and "social." They are simply two aspects of the same thing. He discriminates three meanings of the word, social, none of which, he says, is properly to be contrasted with "individual": (1) that pertaining to the collective aspect of humanity, in its widest and vaguest meaning; (2) that pertaining to immediate intercourse; (3) conducive to collective welfare, and so nearly equivalent to moral. But none of these meanings has "individual" as its natural or logical antithesis.
There are several forms of individualistic views: (1) Mere Individualism. The distributive phase of human life is almost exclusively regarded. Each person is thought of as a separate agent; all social phenomena originate in the action of such agents. This view is much discredited by evolutionary science and philosophy, but is by no means abandoned even in theory, and practically it enters as a premise into most common thought of the day. (2) Double Causation,—a partition of power between society and the individual, both thought of as separate causes. This is ordinarily the view met with in social and ethical discussions. There is here the same premise of the individual as a separate, unrelated agent; but over against him is set a vaguely conceived collective interest or force. People are so accustomed to think of themselves as uncaused causes, special creators on a small scale, that when general phenomena are forced on their notice, they think of them as something additional, and more or less antithetical. The correction of this error will leave the contest between individualism and socialism, considered as philosophical notions, rather than as names for social programs, among the forgotten débris of speculation. (3) The third view he calls Primitive Individualism. The individual is prior in time to society. This view is a variety of the preceding, perhaps formed by mingling individualistic preconceptions with a rather crude evolutionary philosophy. Individuality is lower in rank as well as prior in time. The social is the good, moral, and the individual is the anti-social and bad. Professor Cooley's view is that individuality is neither prior in time, nor inferior in rank, to sociality. If social be applied only to the higher forms of mental life, it should be opposed, not to individual, but to animal or sensual, or the like. Our remote ancestors were just as inferior when viewed separately as when viewed collectively. (4) The fourth form of individualism he calls the Social Faculty view. The social includes only a part, and often a rather definite part, of the individual. Individual and social are two different parts of human nature. Love is social; fear and anger are unsocial and individualistic. Some writers have treated intelligence as an individualistic faculty, and have founded sociality on some form of sentiment. This is well enough if we use social in the second sense of pertaining to immediate conversation, or fellow feeling. But that these sociable emotions are essentially higher, or pertain peculiarly to collective life, is very doubtful. Cooley holds that no such division of human nature is possible. Social or moral progress consists less in the aggrandizement of certain faculties and suppression of others, than in the discipline of all with reference to a progressive organization of life.
The rest of the book is devoted to a study of society in its distributive aspect, or as we should say ordinarily, using the terms which Professor Cooley objects to, the study of the social nature of individuals. It is based in large measure upon a study of the development of children. Personality is an essentially social thing. The "I" feeling is a thing which only social influences can develop.[109] The thought process within the "individual mind" is a social process,—we think in words, and, indeed, in conversations.[110] I shall not develop these notions at length. They are of similar nature to those in Professor Baldwin's Social and Ethical Interpretations, when he discusses the "dialectic of personal growth." They are interesting and pertinent as showing in a concrete way the tremendous and comprehensive sweep of social factors in the creation of the individual mind.
Social Organization, which appeared in 1909, takes up the collective aspect of human-mental life.
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.[111] No one would think it necessary or reasonable to divide the music into two kinds, that made by the whole, and that of the particular instruments, and no more are there two kinds of mind, the social mind and the individual mind. The view that all mind acts together in a vital whole from which that of the individual is never really separate, flows naturally from our growing knowledge of heredity and suggestion, which makes it increasingly clear that every thought we have is linked with the thought of our ancestors and associates, and through them with that of society at large. It is also the only view consistent with the general standpoint of modern science, which admits nothing isolate in nature.
The unity of the social mind consists not in agreement but in organization, in the fact of reciprocal influence or causation among its parts, by virtue of which everything that takes place in it is connected with everything else, and so is an outcome of the whole. Whether, like the orchestra, it gives forth harmony may be a matter of dispute, but that its sound, pleasing or otherwise, is the expression of a vital coöperation, cannot well be denied.[112]
Professor Cooley stresses the unconscious character of many of these social relations. "Although the growth of social consciousness is perhaps the greatest fact of history, it has still but a narrow and fallible grasp of human life." Cooley objects to the Cartesian postulate, which makes "cogito," "I think," the fundamental and most absolutely certain fact in the world. He holds that it grows out of the idiosyncrasy of a highly specialized, introspective philosopher's mind, and that, for the normal mind, "cogitamus," "we think," is just as obvious.[113] The "I" feeling, and the "we" feeling are differentiated together out of the inchoate experience of the child. And "I" and "we" are alike social in their nature. The self, for Professor Cooley, is not a scholastic "soul-substance" or transcendental ego, but simply a relatively differentiated portion of the social mind. "'Social organism' using the term in no abstruse sense, but merely to mean a vital unity in human life, is a fact as obvious to enlightened common sense as individuality."[114]