(5) Less highly organized than the individual mind, the mind of society is less rational, and less highly conscious, than most, if not all, individual minds. "Social self-consciousness" is a rare, if not non-existent phenomenon.
(6) The mind of society, in its entirety, is of necessity not a matter of perception for any individual. Each individual sees only that part which is in his own mind—not all of that!—and in the minds of other individuals with whom he is in communication.
(7) But the minds of other men may be, and normally are, in part objects of perception for any social individual. There may be an "inferential" element in our perception of mental processes in the minds of other men, but it is not inference.
(8) The individual monad is a myth. His machinery of thought—language and logic—is socially given him, his ideals and interests, his tastes even in matters of food and drink, are socially given,—apart from social intercourse his human-mental life would be mere potentiality.
(9) The worth of this conception of social reality, like the worth of other scientific hypotheses, is to be determined by a pragmatic test: does it relate phenomena the connection between which was previously obscure, without introducing greater difficulties of its own? I believe that, for the problem of value theory at least, it will find such a pragmatic justification.
This lengthy excursion into a field not commonly counted as part of the economist's territory is to be justified on the ground that the economist has not only failed to take account of the conclusions reached there, but has also, too often, been making and using assumptions which contradict them. It is further necessary, because the conception of "social value," which forms the subject of this book, assumes a "social organism" which can give value to goods, without making it clear what sort of an organism society is conceived to be. The excursion has at least revealed some of the many meanings that lie behind that term. And it is especially necessary in view of the fact that the conception of "social value" has been attacked on the ground that the organic conception has been abandoned by the sociologists themselves.[117] That this is true of the biological analogy, which made society an animal, and drew social laws from biological laws, rather than from the study of social phenomena, is readily granted. But that sociologists have abandoned the generalized conception which gives us primarily a highly convenient schematism on which to group the social facts that we actually find, is by no means conceded. And the question is really one as to those facts themselves rather than as to the mode of grouping and conceiving them. If social activity be nothing more than a sum of similar individual activities, as Professor Davenport seems to think in the article criticizing Professor Seligman,[118] and if the individual be an isolated monad, then Professor Davenport's criticisms will hold. But if the individual is in vital psychic relation with other individuals, so much so that he is impossible apart from those relations, and if social activity is, not a sum of similar individual activities, but an integration and organization of differentiated and complementary individual activities, spiritual as well as physical, then Professor Davenport's criticisms are not valid. And it is on this point that I would strongly insist. The argument of the following chapters may be put—though not so conveniently—in terms of the mechanical analogy, and the psychical processes treated, not as the action of a unitary, though differentiated, mind, but as a balancing and transformation of forces, and practically the same results for value theory will follow.
FOOTNOTES:
[101] Baldwin, Mark, Social and Ethical Interpretations, 1906 ed., pp. 8-9.
[102] Cf. John Stuart Mill's Logic, book vi, on the nature of social laws.