[27]It is the extension of the self-regarding sentiment of each member to the group as a whole that binds the group together and renders it a collective individual capable of collective volition.
But when he holds [28]that groups are self-conscious according to the degree that the idea of them is present in the minds of the individuals composing them, then we must agree with Dennes that:
[29]to say that a group mind possesses self-consciousness in the sense that its nature is consciously apprehended, by individual minds distinct from it, is the utterance of a contradiction.
It will then be necessary to posit group consciousness as we posit individual consciousness, not distributively but collectively. We have group mind and group will when the group acts as one or behaves as one; but we have group consciousness when the group thinks as one. Not that this action can possibly take place outside of the individual minds; MacDougall is undoubtedly right in his citation of E. Barker: [30]“There is no group mind existing apart from the minds of the members of the group; the group mind exists only in the minds of its members. But nevertheless it exists.” Yet the group mind must include the individual minds in a unified purpose, to which they relinquish their own wills, willingly or with a struggle, whose ideas are their ideas, whose consciousness is, to a certain extent at least, their consciousness. If it is possible, in ordinary speech, to recognize that a man acts now personally, again as a churchman, a citizen, or a committee member, it should be possible to accept this fact as a part of our theory and to embody it as one phase of the theory itself. The individual and the group are not mutually exclusive; neither exists without the other; the group is a part of the individual mind as much as the individual is a part of the group mind.
CHAPTER II.
GROUPS IN CONTACT
1.
Theoretically, the individual might be independent of other individuals and of groups as well. He might be his own alter, so that through the active and reflective standpoints working on each other the individual himself might constitute a group mind, and might produce many, if not all, the characteristic products of the group.[31] But practically in society, the exact opposite is invariably the case. According to Baldwin’s dialectic of the individual development: [32]“The sense of self always involves a sense of the other.” [33]“The real self is always the bipolar self, the social self.” Empirically, not only are civilization, history and government the products of social heredity; the individual himself as we have him owes his mental content, many of his feeling and motor responses, and his ultimate ideals, to the group in which he was born and has developed. On this basis the ancient conflict between the isolated individual and the group domination becomes unimportant, if not meaningless from the empirical point of view. As Joseph K. Hart remarks:
[34]Membership in the group establishes in the members a set of habits which are the personal counterpart of the customs of the group; the group is not outside and around him; it is inside him; what is custom in the group has become habit in him.
Why, then, the eternal conflict between the individual and the group? Why does a Schiller or an Ibsen proclaim, “The strongest man is he who stands most alone”? Why do we have the group portrayed so often as the oppressor, the individual as the hero, genius, and martyr to the conventional ideas of the mass? Because the group has more fixed habits than the individual, or at least than the exceptional individual; because in most individuals the group factor is the dominant one by preference, and the struggle against it is both rare and mild; because, finally, the group mind does involve a sacrifice of the individual purpose on many occasions, and these are the test cases of the strength of the group itself. There are really two types of individuals who stand out from the group—the genius, or social discoverer; the criminal, or social rebel. Platt suggests that [35]“Man has never become entirely socialized”; his biological heredity always lags behind the social heredity of the group and leaves a residuum of conflict. Baldwin gives a broader theory, which may include this: [36]“The individual is the particularizing social force; society is the generalizing social force.” That is, the individual produces variations, which are then stamped out by social disapproval, or generalized by social acceptance. The genius thinks for the race; the mass of individuals have their thinking done for them by the prepared reactions of the group. Without the social group the individual would be as unformed mentally, as helpless ethically, as is the single bee without the hive. In Baldwin’s words: [37]“A man is a social outcome rather than a social unit.”
All this by the way; if I were to take up the problem of the individual and group, it would occupy this entire study. I merely want to show its bearing on the central thesis here brought forward, which concerns the relation between group and group, rather than that between individual and group.