28

of the social which sociological science has found necessary to discard. As Professor W. B. Bodenhafer, in a rather elaborate and convincing study bearing on this point has shown, contemporary scientific sociology has found it warrantable so to extend the rôle of the group concept that today this science holds "that the individual and the group are but different aspects of a group or social situation," or of human life, as Professor Charles H. Cooley, generally recognized as a leading American sociologist, describes the matter.80

Contemporary sociology, in fact, abandons the traditional individualistic approach and accepts the group, that is, social life, as as much a datum, inherent in the nature of things, as is individual life. It demonstrates that group life is as genuinely fundamental, and no less all-inclusive of things, interests, or concerns human, no more derived, secondary, or belonging to any special "sphere"31 or province" than is individual life.

Society, it points out, is rather the larger unity of life, the whole of human kinship and co-operation, inherently unified by direct and indirect personal intercourse, by a common descent, and by common principles of existence. "The real thing," says Professor Cooley, "is human life, which may be considered either in an individual aspect or in a social, that is to say a general, aspect; but is always, as a matter of fact, both individual and general.”33 Things social and things individual, "society" and "individuals," "are simply collective and distributive aspects of the same thing, the relation between them being like that between other expressions, one of which denotes a group as a whole, and the other members of the group, such as the army and the soldiers, the class and the students, and so on."31 Professor Cooley, indeed, presents this

* Cf. his study "The Comparative Rôle of the Group Concept in Ward's Dynamic Sociology and Contemporary American Sociology," in the Amer. Jour. Sociol., November, 1920-May, 1921.

20 Amer. Jour. Sociol. (May, 1921), p. 719.

20 Cf. Human Nature and the Social Order (1922 ed.), pp. 36 ff.

31

See Havelock Ellis, The Task of Social Hygiene, esp. p. 398.

32 Ibid., p. 394; also Sex in Relation to Society, esp. p. 417.

fact of the dual aspect-social and individual, in which the one reality, human life, manifests itself-as the central thesis throughout his writings.35

Matters of sex conduct, marriage, procreation, love, are of course, necessarily included in the social nature of man's life. They, too, may be seen as pertaining both to individual organization of life, and no less truly, also, to the larger aspects of life of which individuals are but participating members.

As in all phases of human life, the mental factors in sex, the various thoughts, sentiments, desires, hopes, anticipations, ways of sexual living, can be seen as both social and individual. These surely have a place in some particular individual's personal life. But they have also larger relations as well. In origin, function, and organization they are necessarily more than individual alone. "There is probably no such thing," says Professor Cooley, "as an idea that is wholly independent of minds other than those in which it exists." There is hardly an element in man's mental life, ordinarily viewed as especially individual, which upon examination is not also someone else's. Mind, individual and social, is all one growth. And its phases may be seen as functioning in impersonal ways, as doctrines, tendencies, institutions, mores, customs; linking individuals, fashioning their acts and practices, and directly or indirectly constituting one whole of human life.

And whether a given aspect of human life is seen as individual or as social depends not upon separateness in the nature of the mental phases nor upon some inherent characteristic which renders them individual or social, but rather upon the point of view by which their functioning is observed.

According to contemporary scientific sociology, society in its widest aspect is this collective functioning of the interrelated mental life of men and women. Society is the total organization of mental functioning, of mental interstimulation and co-operation taking place in men's minds because of men's inherent social na

ture, their mutual mental dependence upon the collective use of common symbols, and their inescapable common life.37

"Society," says Professor Cooley, "is simply the collective aspect of personal thought. Each man's imagination, regarded as a mass of personal impressions worked up into a living, growing whole, that is, human thought considered in the largest way as having a growth and organization extending through the ages, is the locus of society in the widest possible sense."38

The term social, thus, as used in contemporary sociology, must be taken to refer to the collective aspect of the whole of human life, with all its individual striving, personal experiencing, and collective instrumentation.

THE BIOLOGICALLY GIVEN NOT THE ADEQUATE SOURCE FOR CONDUCT

39

Accordingly, instead of ruling things mental out of the sphere of the social, contemporary scientific sociology stresses the mental as peculiarly social. Likewise, instead of making biological heredity the all-important source of acts and practices, and of considering "natural" liberation and spontaneous expression based upon innate endowment as the fundamental in human living, sociology sets forth the importance of other factors.

The point of view in contemporary sociology, however, is synthetic. It sees human life in its complexity, essentially as it is, vital, dynamic, and psychically organic, as a highly intricate working whole, with biological, social, economic, physiological, and physical factors and functions, all working together, and each of the principal ones essential to the others. Thus, while man's human life and sexual conduct is not seen as individually generated from the biologically given, innate endowment and biological factors are not, nevertheless, depreciated.

40

" Charles H. Cooley, ibid., chap. iii; also C. A. Ellwood, Society in Its Psychological Aspects, pp. 11 ff.

38 Op. cit., p. 134.

* Cf. Havelock Ellis, The Task of Social Hygiene, pp. 394, 398 ff.

40 Cf. Charles H. Cooley, Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind, chap. xxviii, etc. Also his discussion in Publications of the American Economic Association (3d ser.), V, 182-87. Also his Social Process, p. 44 n.

In man, sociology points out, innate endowment for mental life takes on a distinctively human character. It is no longer-as is so very largely the case among animals-fixed or innately adapted to function in specific, or biologically predetermined, ways. Its various expressions come to life in response to stimuli of diverse sorts, and in their highest form are quite remote from what they might be if they were mere realizations of the biologically pre-established. Any explanation, it maintains, of human living that claims biological equipment as alone being fundamental is not adequate to the observable facts of human life.

That biological factors alone are inadequate for conduct, it would seem, is becoming established and conceded"1 more and more, even by biologists themselves. The hypothesis of Weismann of the non-transmissibility through the germ plasm of acquired, or "use" traits, and the now so much upheld principles of Mendel of the chance selection13 in the germ plasm of unit characters, emphasize the inherent necessity of another source than mere innate equipment for the organization and development of man's characteristically "adaptational" and "instrumentational" ways of living."

Anthropologists, moreover, are demonstrating the importance of cultural factors by facts and considerations which indicate a comparative equality in innate mental endowment of all known "J. A. Thomson, Heredity, chap. xiv; ibid., What is Man?, pp. 149 ff.; E. G. Conklin, Heredity and Environment in The Development of Man, chap. iv, etc. Also many others.

42 W. E. Castle, Genetics and Eugenics, pp. 370 ff., and others.

43

T. H. Morgan, A Critique of the Theory of Evolution, final chapter; also W. Bateson, Mendel's Principles of Heredity, chap. xv, etc.

44 Says John Dewey: "With civilized man, all sorts of intermediate terms come in between the stimulus and the overt act, and between the overt act and the final satisfaction. Man no longer defines his end to be the satisfaction of hunger as such. It is so complicated and loaded with all kinds of technical activities, associations and deliberations and social divisions of labor that conscious attention and interest are in the process and its content. Even in the crudest agriculture means are developed to the point where they demand attention on their own account, and control the formation and use of habits to such an extent that they are the central interests, while the food process and enjoyment as such is incidental and occasional." In "Interpretation of Savage Mind," Psychol. Rev., IX, 221; also L. T. Hobhouse, Mind in Evolution, chap. xviii; also L. T. Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution, chap. viii; A. A. Goldenweiser, Early Civilization, Introduction.

45

races, and during all times-in spite of the evident difference of actual achievement from race to race. The evidence that they adduce discredits the alleged biological inequality between modern and primitive man in either sense perception, in capacity for abstract thought, or in innate possibility for achievement in the arts of civilized man.

46

This whole conception of man's biological nature has, indeed, been searchingly criticized more directly on its psychological side. The explanatory value of a theory of instincts, or of positing innately predisposing ways of human behavior as the bases of conduct has long been under dispute." And now even Professor William McDougall, whose writings are so largely responsible for the vogue the theory of instincts has had in psychology, has, in his Outline of Psychology, so modified his account as to allow a larger rôle to society in molding men's conduct.50

49

48

The larger considerations, if there were no more direct evidence that render untenable the claim that ready-made, inborn mechanisms alone-individually matured and developed—are adequate for man's conduct, are many and convincing. Among these-to mention here a few—are the facts growing out of man's undoubted necessity, in view of the complexity of his life and of the diversity of its conditions, continually to reconstitute his conduct by repeat

45 F. Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man; A. A. Goldenweiser, op. cit.; J. R. Angell, Evolution of Intelligence in the Evolution of Man; Charles H. Cooley, "Genius, Fame, and the Comparison of Races," Pub. Amer. Ac. Pol. and Soc. Sc., Vol. CXCVII; John Dewey, op. cit., p. 223.

46

Cf. L. L. Bernard's study, Instinct, a Study in Social Psychology, 1924.

"The articles on this point are very many. Among the more suggestive are: L. L. Bernard, Psychol. Rev., March, 1921; C. H. Cooley, the Introduction to his Human Nature and the Social Order, 1922 ed.; John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, esp. Part II; J. R. Kantor, Psychol. Rev., 1920; C. C. Josey, The Social Philosophy of Instinct; Zing Yang Kuo, Journal of Philosophy, XVIII, 645–64; C. A. Ellwood, Sociology in Its Psychological Aspects, chap ix; E. C. Hayes, Introduction to Sociology (1921 ed.), chap. xiii; Ellsworth Faris, Amer. Jour. Sociol. (September, 1921), pp. 184–96; J. Arthur Thomson, What Is Man?, pp. 149-54.

49 His Introduction to Social Psychology, first published in 1908. "Published in 1923.

50

Cf., ibid., Preface, p. xii, and p. 114 on the specificity of instinct.