of a question of fact or of mathematics, it is not; but then, neither are most questions. It is at least answerable in the sense that one may hope to reach a sounder judgment by thoughtfully addressing one's self to it, than by uttering a snap judgment or echoing the customary judgment.

But is it a useful question? I am fully alive to the fact that there may be artificial and gratuitious questions, and that the philosopher is suspected of inventing them in order to provide himself an occupation. It has been said of a well-known philosopher that his philosophizing was a game in which he first hid an object and then pretended he didn't know where it was, all for the fun of trying to find it. So the philosopher is sometimes grouped with the lawyer as one who makes trouble in order that he may fatten on it. If men were only left to live in peace, they would need no lawyers; if they were only left to their common sense, they would need no philosophers.

I am willing to accept the parallel, but not the verdict. The important point in both cases is that it is not commonly the same individual who makes the trouble and offers the remedy. If the same lawyer cultivated litigiousness and then proposed to satisfy it, he might be a fit subject for disbarment proceedings. The unfortunate fact is, however, that litigiousness springs naturally from the human breast, and that every man is in the first instance his own lawyer. The professional lawyer is the fruit and not the root of amateur litigiousness. Similarly the loss of common sense is as natural to man as the loss of innocence, and every man is in the first instance his own philosopher. The professional philosopher is the fruit and not the root of the speculative impulse.

It must, however, be admitted that what one lawyer or philosopher sets up, in the interest of mankind, another lawyer or philosopher may feel called upon to renovate or take down; so that the original needs are often lost sight of. Philosophers, like lawyers, may in this way be largely occupied with each other and with their own products; and an outsider is tempted to feel that while the philosophers evidently need one another the world at large could get on comfortably without any of them. It is said that one of the Transcendentalist disciples of Amos Bronson Alcott put

the question to him in this form: "Mr. Alcott, does omnipotence abnegate attribute?" In this case the demand for light, as well as the supply, seems to have been created by the business. The world was not hanging on the answer; or, if it was, it did not know it. And the extraordinary and regrettable thing about it is that once a question of this sort gets put, people will go on debating it forever, long after the occasion for it is past, and despite the fact that all parties to the discussion would be very much at a loss to explain what they meant by their terms.

In raising the question "Is there a social mind?" I am quite aware of all this, and duly humble in view of the notorious pedantry of the philosophical mind. Indeed it is because of this awareness that I do raise the question. I call for the question, in other words, not so much in order to have it put, as to find out what it is. And my excuse is that there is no one but the philosopher who can protect the general public from the abuse of their confidence by other philosophers. Don't promote thievery; but if there be thieves then set a thief to catch a thief. Since there is and must be philosophy, then a philosopher with a sense of responsibility must be willing to assume the rôle of a protector of the guileless.

One may still have doubts as to the profitableness of this particular kind of question, doubts that would perhaps find expression as follows: "Isn't it, after all, merely a matter of words? Provided we can obtain the facts regarding human relations, what earthly difference does it make whether we call them by the name of 'social mind' or by any other name, sacred or profane?" Now I am perfectly willing to admit that it is a matter of words, provided the objector is willing to omit the derogatory "merely." It does, after all, make a good deal of difference what things are called. I doubt, for example, whether anyone who reads these words would regard it as a matter of indifference whether he was called a liar or a gentleman, even though the ascertainable facts might be the same in either case. The reason is that the epithet indicates the attitude; the man who calls me a liar views me with distrust, hostility, or contempt. Similarly, there is the case of the Central American customs collector who remarked that "dogs is dogs, and

Richard Garnett's Life of Emerson, 1888, p. 100.

cats is dogs; but turtles is birds." It was not a matter of indifference that a turtle should be called a bird, because it indicated a practical intention to treat the turtle like a bird.

So it may prove a matter of the utmost importance whether we do or do not call an aggregate of human beings "a social mind," or "a state personality" of "a collective will." It implies an intention to treat them as such; to transfer to a collectivity of human beings methods of action and modes of sentiment which have been deemed appropriate only to a single human being. Thus it makes a difference whether we call a corporation a fictitious person or a real person. In the former case we treat a corporation as a being having only a legal status; in the latter case we treat a corporation as a human individual in having various extralegal relations and capacities which it may at any time be incumbent on the law to recognize. It makes a difference whether we regard the state as a collection, an organism, a mechanism, or a person; because, in the last case at least, we have an appropriate attitude in readiness. In accordance with a deeply rooted and apparently inalienable trait, when a man finds himself in the presence of what he calls a person of a higher order, he worships it, or rather him or her. It would make a considerable difference to a man's conduct if he should regard corporations as having souls to save, or a state as having a divinity to worship.

The question concerning what it is proper to call an aggregate of related human beings has of late been growing more and more urgent for two reasons. In the first place, there has been a swing of psychological doctrine away from an excessive emphasis on the individual. We are still in a stage of reaction against the errors of the eighteenth century. It was then thought that man was naturally self-centered, that he acted solely from a calculation of selfinterest. To offset this error it has been necessary to exaggerate the extent of his regard for others; in other words, to put the emphasis on sympathy, imitation, gregariousness, and the parental instinct. Again, it was once thought that man was self-sufficient and that for his happiness and perfection he needed only to be removed from the intrusion and tyranny of his fellows. To offset this error it has been necessary to insist upon the value of organiza

tion and institutional control. Furthermore, the old psychology, which was excessively rationalistic, neglected the unintended and elusive, but widespread and unceasing, play of mind on mind. Thus the new movement has been a wholesome corrective and supplement to the old psychology. It has required its catchwords for driving home the truth-such catchwords as "the crowd," "the group mind," "the social consciousness," and "the collective will." We have thus acquired a polemical vocabulary which threatens to beget new superstitions, scarcely less blind than the old.

At the same time that there has been a swing of psychological doctrine toward the social aspects of human nature, these aspects have themselves been greatly increased in number and variety. Thus Maitland, in his Introduction to Gierke's Political Theories of the Middle Age, remarks that "in the second half of the nineteenth century corporate groups of the most various sorts have been multiplying all the world over at a rate that far outstrips the increase of 'natural persons.'" This is true not only of corporations in the legal sense, but of nation-states having a vivid sense of corporate unity, and of innumerable associations within the state. Organization has become a habit, if not a disease. There is no individual who does not belong to something, and the average individual belongs to a great variety of intersecting groups, in each of which he has a different status and plays a different part. The activities incident to this multiple membership make up the larger part of a man's life, and the whole of his obituary. Unorganized social groups have also shown a tendency to increase in number, variety, volume, and importance. There have always been crowds; but whereas close physical proximity was once necessary, modern facilities for communication, publicity, and transportation, together with the wide diffusion of literacy, have made it possible for crowd influences to overcome distance and to act upon the individual almost continuously.

In view of these facts it is not strange that the last threequarters of a century should have witnessed an enormous and diversified growth of social science; or that we should find ourselves equipped with an extensive and vivid social vocabulary. Nor would it be surprising if this vocabulary should require some 1 Edition of 1913, p. xii.

overhauling lest terms and phrases which have served a useful purpose in dislodging old prejudices and exciting the speculative imagination should conduce to incoherence, credulity, sentimentality, or even fanaticism. That incoherence, at least, is not uncommon even among those who call themselves social scientists, could be proved to the reader's satisfaction by citing long extracts from their writings. But that will not be necessary. The mere threat will, I am sure, move him to concede the point. Let us, therefore, proceed without further preliminaries, to our analysis.

I shall distinguish and illustrate five characters that may be applied to collections, aggregates, manifolds, or groups' of any kind; to groups of bodies, inorganic and organic, as well as to groups of human beings. I propose, in other words, to consider certain abstract features of grouping in general, more or less independently of social aggregation. I do so because I believe that most of the difficulties arise from the confused use of these comparatively simple ideas in their application to such very complicated phenomena as human relations. I want to show, too, that they are very common workaday ideas. It is customary to apply them with awe and reverence to society when, as a matter of fact, they can equally well be applied to the alphabet or to a five-foot shelf of books. These abstract group-characters to which I wish to call attention are (1) class, (2) whole, (3) individual, (4) system, and (5) compound.

1. By a class we mean an aggregate of individuals, of which the same thing is true. Thus all the men of whom it is true that they were born on August 2, form a class. The extreme lower limit of a class would be an aggregate of individuals of all of whom it was true only that they existed, or that they were mentioned, as, for example, Lewis Carroll's class of "shoes and ships and sealingwax, and cabbages and kings"; or Stevenson's "the world is full of a number of things." Ordinarily, however, we think of a class as an aggregate of individuals having much in common; or where that which is true of all is the most definitive and explanatory truth about each, as in the case of an animal or plant species. When this is the case the class-name is the common noun used for designat* I shall use these terms interchangeably to mean bare manyness or plurality. C. I. Lewis, Survey of Symbolic Logic, 1918, p. 261.