[9]. The break in the English Cabinet in 1915, which led to the coalition Cabinet, came when both Kitchener and Churchill tried to substitute individual for group action.
[10]. Free speech is not an “individual” right; society needs every man’s difference.
[11]. It has been overemphasized in two ways: first, many of the writers on imitation ignore the fact that the other law of association, that of interpenetrating, is also in operation in our social life, as well as the fact that it has always been the fundamental law of existence; secondly, they speak as if it were necessary for human beings to be under the law of imitation, not that it is merely a stage in our development.
[12]. This is the alpha and omega of philosophical teaching: Heraclitus said, “Nature desires eagerly opposites and out of them it completes its harmony, not out of similars.” And James, twenty-four hundred years later, has given his testimony that the process of life is to “compenetrate.”
[13]. Also the group-units of early societies are studied to the exclusion of group-units within modern complex society.
[14]. Even some of our most advanced thinking, which repudiates the like-minded theory and takes pains to prove that imitation is not an instinct, nevertheless falls into some of the errors implicit in the imitation theory.
[15]. When we come in [Part III] to consider the group process in relation to certain political methods now being proposed, we shall find that part of the present disagreement of opinion is verbal. I therefore give here a list of words which can be used to describe the genuine social process and a list which gives exactly the wrong idea of it. Good words: integrate, interpenetrate, interpermeate, compenetrate, compound, harmonize, correlate, coördinate, interweave, reciprocally relate or adapt or adjust, etc. Bad words: fuse, melt, amalgamate, assimilate, weld, dissolve, absorb, reconcile (if used in Hegelian sense), etc.
[16]. This does not, however, put us with those biologists who make conscience a “gregarious instinct” and—would seem to be willing to keep it there. This is the insidious herd fallacy which crops up constantly in every kind of place. We may to-day partake largely of the nature of the herd, our conscience may be to some extent a herd conscience, but such is not the end of man for it is not the true nature of man—man does not find his expression in the herd.
[17]. To a misunderstanding of this point are due some of the fallacies of the political pluralists (see [ch. XXXII]).