Some views of group mind are vitiated for our present purpose by the narrow limits they impose, or by the one-sided way in which they arrive at their definitions. This applies especially to those who use the mob as the typical group and consider “crowd-mindedness” (to use Everett Dean Martin’s term) as a synonym of sociality. The crowd, the herd, the mob are various terms for an exceptional type of group of human beings, bound together by physical presence, transformed by a powerful emotion, launched finally into unified and often violent action. But as Baldwin says:[10] “The mind of the crowd is essentially a temporary, unorganized, ineffective thing.... The mob is a by-product of society, it is the exaggeration of the normal.” Finally, the group mind need not be expressed entirely in terms of instinctive adaptation, any more than the mind of the individual; either may have many types, may be instinctive or impulsive or rational, may have a growing sense of rationality and a growing power of independent, deliberate action. In opposition to MacDougall, with his elaborate system of instincts and sentiments, we may place the vast majority of students of the problem, Cooley, Platt, Ellwood, Baldwin, and so on. Even when the members of a group all use reason to a very high degree, they still constitute a group if they have organization and some method of reaching a general decision, as in a congress, a national association of scientists, or a business corporation.
Obviously, human beings form many kinds of groups, and there would then, on an empirical basis, be many varieties of group minds. Individuals fall into many classes, as we all know, primitive and cultured, ignorant and educated, the infant, the child and the adult, the moron and the genius. So with the group. There are large and small groups, from families to nations; temporary and permanent ones, from the theatre audience to the church; simple and complex, from town meeting to a Federal union, comprising states, counties, cities and townships; unorganized and organized; groups founded on physical presence, like a baseball team, and international bodies of scientists or philosophers who may form “a school of thought” but may never hold a meeting. The study of these various types is not only interesting in itself; it may help us in formulating the principle of the mind of the group as a whole. To begin with the definition of the primitive group by Franz Boaz:
[11]There are a number of primitive hordes to whom every stranger not a member of the horde is an enemy, and where it is right to damage the enemy to the best of one’s power and ability, and if possible to kill him. This custom is based largely on the idea of the solidarity of the horde, and on the feeling that it is the duty of every member of the horde to destroy all possible enemies.... The feeling of the fellowship in the horde corresponds to the feeling of unity in the tribe, to a recognition of bonds established by a neighborhood of habitat, and further on to the feeling of fellowship among members of nations.
“He who is not with me is against me,”[12] said Jesus for the religious group. How far we have proceeded from the horde in our civilized nations, and how near we are to it still in the essential character of the mind of the group!
3.
Does the group mind exist? Not as a super-consciousness, external to the individuals composing it—that view has been discarded long ago. But as a category which is needed to explain many phenomena, and which we can then proceed to study and explain in greater detail, a term with pragmatic value, such as “life” or “mind.” “Life” is no longer used as a principle of explanation, as a vital principle which is infused into dead matter, but life exists, for all that, and we can see its effects and study them. “Mind” is not something separate and distinct from the body in which it dwells or from the world in which it acts, but we know that mind is a useful and necessary category in which to include a whole phase of living being, especially of human life. “Group Mind” is the same sort of category as these. Just as mind inheres in the neurones and is coincident with the chemical changes in them, and yet cannot be summed up by chemical changes; so group mind inheres in the brains, of individuals and is coincident with individual ideas and acts, yet cannot be summed up as so many individual responses but as the unified response of a group of persons at once.
Morris Ginsberg, in his Psychology of Society, opposes any type of group theory, as he sees only individuals in a social environment; he holds that the group may have unity of content but not of process, of ideas and ideals but not of mind. Floyd H. Allport speaks of “The group fallacy,” [13]“the error of substituting the group as a whole as a principle of explanation in place of the individuals in the group,” to which Emory S. Bogardus replies in his discussion that [14]“if there is a group fallacy, there is also an individual fallacy.”
On the other hand, so radical a behaviorist as E. C. Lindeman remarks, [15]“The group is a plurality of individuals, but what the group does is not plural but singular.” [16]“From the purely descriptive point of view, the group becomes a new quality.” Dr. M. M. Davis puts it this way: [17]“Millions of brain cells are co-ordinated to think as one brain. Psychology tries to tell how. Millions of brains co-ordinate themselves and function in many ways as one brain. The how of that marvel is for sociology.” Giddings calls the group mind “the concert of thought, emotion and will” of individual minds. Cooley says: [18]“The unity of the social mind consists not in agreement but in organization.” Ellwood phrases it somewhat differently:
[19]The only unity we have in society is a unity of process. The individual consciousness is unified both structurally and functionally.... There is a collective mental life, but no social mind in the same sense in which there is an individual mind.
Dr. Baldwin sums up his view in the last sentences of the Social and Ethical Interpretations: