An alternative and not inappropriate title would have been “An Outline of Social Psychology”; but two reasons prevented the adoption of this. First, my Introduction to Social Psychology has become generally known by the abbreviated title Social Psychology. This was an unforeseen result and unfortunate designation; for, as I have explained in the Preface to the present volume, that other work was designed merely as a propaedeutic; it aimed merely at clearing the ground and laying the foundations for Social Psychology, while leaving the topic itself for subsequent treatment. Secondly, I conceive Group Psychology to be a part only, though a very large part, of the total field of Social Psychology; for, while the former has to deal only with the life of groups, the latter has also to describe and account for the influence of the group on the growth and activities of the individual. This is the most concrete part of psychology and naturally comes last in the order of development of the science; for, like other sciences, psychology began with the most abstract notions, the forms of activity of mind in general, and, by the aid of the abstract conceptions achieved by the earlier workers, progresses to the consideration of more concrete problems, the problems presented by actual living persons in all their inexhaustible richness and complexity.
Until the later decades of the nineteenth century, psychology continued to concern itself almost exclusively with the mind of man conceived in an abstract fashion, not as the mind of any particular individual, but as the mind of a representative individual considered in abstraction from his social settings as something given to our contemplation fully formed and complete.
Two important changes of modern thought have shown the necessity of a more concrete treatment of psychological problems. The first has been the coming into prominence of the problems of genesis which, although not originated by Darwin, received so great an impetus from his work. The second has been the increasing realisation of the need for a more synthetic treatment of all fields of science, the realisation that analysis alone carries us ever farther away from concrete problems and leads only to a system of abstract conceptions which are very remote from reality, however useful they may prove in the physical sciences. The biological and the human sciences especially have been profoundly affected by these two changes of modern thought. As Theodore Merz has so well shown in the fourth volume of his monumental work[1], the need has been increasingly felt of the vue d’ensemble, of the synthetic mode of regarding organisms, men, and institutions, not as single things, self-contained and complete in themselves, but as merely nodes or meeting points of all the forces of the world acting and reacting in unlimited time and space.
Psychology was, then, until recent years the science of the abstract individual mind. Each worker aimed at rendering by the aid of introspection an analytic description of the stream of his own consciousness, a consistent classification of the elements or features that he seemed to discover therein, and some general laws or rules of the order of succession and conjunction of these features; postulating in addition some one or more explanatory principles or active agencies such as ‘the will’ or the desire of pleasure, the aversion from pain, or ‘the association of ideas,’ to enable him to account for the flow of the distinguishable elements of consciousness. The psychology achieved by these studies, necessary and valuable as they were, was of little help to men who were struggling with the concrete problems of human life and was therefore largely ignored by them. But, as I have pointed out in the Introduction to my Social Psychology, those who approached these problems were generally stimulated to do so by their interest in questions of right and wrong, in questions of norms and standards of conduct, the urgency of which demanded immediate answers for the practical guidance of human life in all its spheres of activity, for the shaping of laws, institutions, governments, and associations of every kind; or, as frequently perhaps, for the justification and defence of standards of conduct, modes of belief, and forms of institution, which men had learnt to esteem as supremely good.
Thus the political science of Hobbes was the expression of his attempt to justify the monarchy established by the Tudors and endangered by the failings of the Stuart kings; while that of Locke was equally the outcome of his desire to justify the revolution of 1668. Hobbes felt it worth while to preface his magnum opus on political philosophy with a fanciful sketch of human nature and of primitive society; yet, as Mr Gooch remarks, “neither Hobbes nor his contemporaries knew anything of the actual life of primitive communities[2].” And it may be added that they knew as little of the foundations of human nature. Again, the social doctrines of Rousseau, with all their false psychology, were formulated in order to stir men to revolt against the conditions of social life then prevalent in Europe. In a similar way, in the development of all that body of social doctrine that went under the name of Utilitarianism and which culminated in the political science and economy of the Manchester School, every step was prompted by the desire to find theoretical guidance or justification for rules governing human activity. And, if we go back to the Politics of Aristotle, we find the normative or regulative aim still more prominent.
Thus, in all the human sciences, we see that the search for what is has been inextricably confused with and hampered by the effort to show what ought to be; and the further back we go in their history, the more does the normative point of view predominate. They all begin in the effort to describe what ought to be; and incidentally give some more or less fallacious or fantastic account of what is, merely in order to support the normative doctrines. And, as we trace their history forward towards the present time, we find the positive element coming more and more to the front, until it tends to preponderate over and even completely to supplant the normative aim. Thus even in Ethics there is now perceptible in some quarters a tendency to repudiate the normative standpoint. All the social sciences have, then, begun their work at what, from the strictly logical point of view, was the wrong end; instead of first securing a basis of positive science and then building up the normative doctrines upon that basis, they have advanced by repeatedly going backwards towards what should have been their foundations. Now the most important part of the positive basis of the social sciences is psychology; we find accordingly the social sciences at first ignoring psychology and then gradually working back to it; they became gradually more psychological and, in proportion as they did so, they became more valuable. Modern writers on these topics fall into two classes; those who have attempted to work upon a psychological foundation, and those who have ignored or denied the need of any such basis. The earlier efforts of the former kind, among which we may reckon those of Adam Smith, Bentham, and the Mills, although they greatly influenced legislation and practice in general, have nevertheless brought the psychological method into some disrepute, because they reasoned from psychological principles which were unduly simplified and in fact misleading, notably the famous principle of psychological hedonism on which they so greatly relied. Their psychology was, in brief, too abstract; it had not achieved the necessary concreteness, which only the introduction of the genetic standpoint and the vue d’ensemble could give it. Other writers on the social sciences were content to ignore the achievements of psychology; but, since they dealt with the activities of human beings and the products of those activities, such as laws, institutions and customs, they could hardly avoid all reference to the human mind and its processes; they then relied upon the crude unanalysed psychological conceptions of popular speech; often they went further and, aspiring to explain the phenomena they described, made vast assumptions about the constitution and working of the human mind. Thus, for example, Renan, when he sought to explain some feature of the history of a nation or society, was in the habit, like many others, of ascribing it to some peculiar instinct which he postulated for this particular purpose, such as a political or a religious instinct or an instinct of subordination or of organisation. Comte made egoism and altruism the two master forces of the mind. Sir Henry Maine asserted that “satisfaction and impatience are the two great sources of political conduct,” and, after asserting that “no force acting on mankind has been less carefully examined than Party, and yet none better deserves examination,” he was content to conclude that “Party is probably nothing more than a survival and a consequence of the primitive combativeness of mankind[3].” More recently Prof. Giddings has discovered the principal force underlying all human associations in Consciousness of Kind. Butler and the intuitive moralists postulated ‘conscience’ or moral sense as something innately present in the souls of men; while the creators of the classical school of political economy were for the most part content to assume that man is a purely rational being who always intelligently pursues his own best interest, a false premise from which they deduced some conclusions that have not withstood the test of time. Similar vague assumptions may be found in almost every work on the social sciences,—all illustrating the need for a psychology more concrete than the older individual psychology, as a basis for these sciences, a positive science, not of some hypothetical Robinson Crusoe, but of the mental life of men as it actually unfolds itself in the families, tribes, nations, societies of all sorts, that make up the human world.
The general growth of interest in genetic problems, stimulated so greatly by the work of Darwin, turned the attention of psychologists to the problem of the genesis of the developed human mind,—the problem of its evolution in the race and its development in the individual. Then it at once became apparent that both these processes are essentially social; that they involve, and at every step are determined by, interactions between the individual and his social environment; that, while the growth of the individual mind is moulded by the mental forces of the society in which it grows up, those forces are in turn the products of the interplay of the minds composing the society; that, therefore, we can only understand the life of individuals and the life of societies, if we consider them always in relation to one another. It was realised that each man is an individual only in an incomplete sense; that he is but a unit in a vast system of vital and spiritual forces which, expressing themselves in the form of human societies, are working towards ends which no man can foresee; a unit whose chief function it is to transmit these forces unimpaired, which can change or add to them only in infinitesimal degree, and which, therefore, has but little significance and cannot be accounted for when considered in abstraction from that system. It became clear that the play of this system of forces at any moment of history is predominantly determined by conditions which are themselves the products of an immensely long course of evolution, conditions which have been produced by the mental activities of countless generations and which are but very little modified by the members of society living at any one time; so that, as has been said, society consists of the dead as well as of the living, and the part of the living in determining its life is but insignificant as compared with the part of the dead.
Any psychology that recognises these facts and attempts to display the reciprocal influences of the individual and the society in which he plays his part may be called Social Psychology. Collective or Group Psychology is, then, a part of this larger field. It has to study the mental life of societies of all kinds; and such understanding of the group life as it can achieve has then to be used by Social Psychology in rendering more concrete and complete our understanding of the individual life.
Group Psychology itself consists properly of two parts, that which is concerned to discover the most general principles of group life, and that which applies these principles to the study of particular kinds and examples of group life. The former is logically prior to the second; though in practice it is hardly possible to keep them wholly apart. The present volume is concerned chiefly with the former branch. Only when the general principles of group life have been applied to the understanding of particular societies, of nations and the manifold system of groups within the nation, will it be possible for Social Psychology to return upon the individual life and give of it an adequate account in all its concrete fulness.