The Basis of Social Relations: A Study in Ethnic Psychology

by Daniel G. Brinton

On the other hand, as the group is a generic concept only, it has no objective existence. It lives only in the individuals which compose it; and only by studying them singly can we reach any fact or principle which is true of them in the aggregate.

Yet it is almost as correct to maintain that the group is that which alone of the two is real. The closer we study the individual, the more do his alleged individualities cease, as such, and disappear in the general laws by virtue of which society exists; the less baggage does he prove to have which is really his own; the more do all his thoughts, traits, and features turn out to be those of others; so that, at last, he melts into the mass, and there is nothing left which he has a right to claim as his personal property. His pretended personal mind is the reflex of the group-minds around him, as his body is in every fibre and cell the repetition of his species and race. As an American writer strongly puts it: “Morally I am as much a part of society as physically I am a part of the world’s fauna.”

But let no one deduce from this that the group is merely the sum total of the individuals which compose it, the net balance of their thoughts and lives. Nothing would be more erroneous. I have already said that laws and processes belong to the group which are foreign to the individual. We may go further, and prove that these processes, the spirit of the group, are quite different from those of any single member of it. To use the expression of Wundt: “The resultant arising from united psychological processes includes contents which are not present in the components.”

In numerous respects, indeed, the individual and the group stand in opposition to each other. The qualities of the former are incoherent, disorderly, irregular; while those of the latter are fixed, stable, computable.

Let us contemplate further this relation of the individual to the group, for upon its correct apprehension must the whole fabric of ethnic psychology, as a science, rest.

In every healthy individual there is a feeling that his thoughts and actions are vain unless they are somehow directed towards his fellow human beings; yet there is a further feeling that these fellow creatures are but a means for the developing and perfecting of himself. He desires to be intimately associated with the group, but not to be absorbed and lost in it. His unconscious goal is individuality, but not isolation; and he feels that the most complete and sane individuality can be obtained only by association with others of his kind. For that reason, he submits his will to the collective will, his consciousness to the collective consciousness. He accepts from the group the ideas, conclusions, and opinions common to it, and the motives of volition, such as customs and rules of conduct, which it collectively sanctions.

These ideas and motives are strictly the property of the group, not of its separate members. Such a prevailing unity of thought and sentiment does not rest on unanimity of opinion; it does not necessarily exclude any amount of individuality, and is consistent with the utmost freedom of the personal mind. Its basis is a similarity of form and direction of the psychical activities, guiding and modifying them in such a way that a general colour and tendency can be recognised.

If it is asked, on what ultimate psychical concept the differences of collective or group-minds are based in a last analysis, I am inclined to answer with Wilhelm von Humboldt, that it is on the currently accepted relation of the material to the immaterial world. The solution adopted for this insoluble problem is the hidden spring of motive in the minds of all.

The actual existence of the group-mind can no more be denied than the constant inter-relation between it and the individual mind. It takes nothing from its reality that it exists only in individual wills. To deny it on that account, as Wundt admirably says, is as illogical as to deny the existence of a building because the single stones of which it is composed may be removed. Indeed, it might claim higher reality than the individual mind in that its will is more potent and can attain greater results by collective action.

Of course, there is no metaphysical “substance” or mythological “being” behind the collective mind. That were a nonsensical notion. Nor is it in any sense a voluntary invention, created by contract for utilitarian ends. That were a gross misconception. It is the actual agreement and interaction of individuals resulting in mental modes, tendencies, and powers not belonging to any one member, and moving under laws developed by the requirements of this independent existence. It is like an orchestra which can produce harmonies by the blending of the strains of numerous instruments impossible to any one of them.