modesty, discretion, and moral feelings, are newer, less resolute, and more susceptible to derangement. As a result, when alcohol is taken into the system, its destructive power is first felt by these higher nerve centers. The restraining influences of good manners and good morals are swept aside or inhibited. And left without these checks and balances, the merely animal impulses come to mastery, so that a man in his cups becomes boastful, obscene, beastly. He does things for which he has to apologize the next day. Intoxication is not increase of life, but putting the reins into the hands of the animal within us. Liquor changes the character by paralyzing the best and highest in us. It puts the real man to sleep. He is not there. This inhibition produced by alcohol is what makes its use so harmful and so dangerous. It tends to strike down all the finer products of culture and civilization. It is more than merely a life-destroyer, for it destroys the higher life and puts the spirit in subjection to the brutish. Therefore, we deal here, not only with a superstition that is false, but with a superstition that is deadly. SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF THE SPECTATOR' GEORGE ELLIOTT HOWARD The task set me tonight is born of the scientific faith which even the newest of the disciplines has inspired. Social psychology, at first in danger of rejection by the builders of "orthodox psychology," seems destined to become the "head of the corner" in the new temple of social education. Great and beneficent has been the rôle in pedagogy of so-called "individual" psychology as an experimental science. Through the study of child-psychology, in particular-from Comenius to Rousseau and Froebel, from Pestalozzi and Herbart to G. Stanley Hall and his discipleseducational method has been vitalized, humanized, and inspired. Yet, how very much of the most fruitful of this long process of "psychologizing education"-as Pestalozzi called it—is in reality but an application of "social psychology," even before the name was born. WHAT IS SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY? Moreover, there is good reason to believe that through the conscious and organized use of the laws of the "social mind" as opposed to the "individual mind”—though possibly each of these useful terms when rigorously analyzed may prove to be but a vivid metaphor-education is about to win its crowning victory, to exploit its widest and richest domain-a domain until very recently unbroken save perchance almost unawares by the adventurous pathfinder. Just as sociology, in the few years since it gained the method and the organization of a science, has immensely widened our horizon and increased our power for conscious mastery of the environment, notably the human environment; so the rise of social psychology as a specialized division of sociology has much broadened the vision, sharpened the insight, and intensified the power of the sociologist. A paper read at the Conference on Physical Education and Hygiene, Chicago, April 26, 1912. Among teachers of experience the conviction is deepening that social psychology is by far the most practical, the most fruitful, division of sociological science. Social psychology is applied sociology at its best. In this presence, I take it, there is no need of formal definitions. Social mind, social consciousness, inter-mental phenomena: these and similar terms convey a practical meaning sufficiently well understood. Do they not predicate a precious human faculty which if wisely controlled may tend ever to lift civilization to higher and yet higher planes of social well-being? They imply a social-psychic life which transcends that of the single personality. It is the purpose of this paper to outline a new chapter in the history of that social-psychic life. It will consider: (1) the elements of spectator-psychology; (2) the spectator-crowd and the dramatic-spectacle; (3) the spectator-crowd and the athletic spectacle; (4) the problem of social control. I. THE ELEMENTS OF SPECTATOR-PSYCHOLOGY Social psychology considers the spectator in two situations: first as a separate personality; and second as a unit of the spectatorcrowd. Each social personality-the child, the adolescent, the adult-may view a spectacle alone or as one in a mass or agglomeration of such personalities; and his psychic experience, the effect upon him, will not be the same in the second situation as in the first. A game of football, a drama, or a motion-picture, however stirring, would hardly carry the solitary spectator "off his feet.” THE ABSOLUTE INDIVIDUAL IS A MYTH Yet the stimulus of the spectacle and the emotional or motor response of the solitary spectator are mainly a social-psychic process. True, each human organism comes into the world with an ancestral heritage of elementary instincts, impulses, tendencies, or their surviving rudiments. Who shall dare to say how much of this heritage, through the processes of selection and assimilation, is not of social origin, due to the interaction of human minds? Is man naturally a social animal? The last affirmative answer to this much argued question is Dr. Trotter's enlightening discussion of an original human "herd-instinct and its bearing on the psychology of civil ized man." In fact the isolated or absolute individual is a myth. The more keenly we scrutinize the genesis of personality the more the purely individual factors--if there be such-shrink in the vanishing perspective of human evolution. In the spectator-crowd, as will presently appear, how very much of the relatively undisciplined social instincts or desires of forgotten generations wells up from the deep abyss of the unconscious or the subconscious. In a word, it seems certain that the child inherits social feeling; that potentially it is born with the craving for companionship, sociability. It needs the stimulus of other personalities for the normal unfoldment of its own nascent mental faculty. Here is something larger, more generic than the struggle or gaming instinct, than even the play-impulse, though each of these is of vital import for spectator-psychology. Whatever doubt may still linger as to the pre-natal origin of social instinct or emotion, very little remains as to its post-natal history. More and more clearly mental growth appears as social growth, and social growth as mental growth. Almost from the first the child's consciousness is known to unfold as a composite personality. Either the new contents of the mind are apperceived, taken over from other personalities-from the social environment; or else they consist of the child's idea of the nature of other personalities, an idea inferred from his own feelings or emotions originally stimulated by such personalities. Here one recognizes the "dialectic of personal growth," the marvelous process of give-and-take in the expansion of the social consciousness of the human soul, which Professor Baldwin has so luminously disclosed. SOCIAL PERSONALITY A PSYCHIC FACT More recently Dr. Cooley has revealed society "in its immediate aspect" as simply a "relation among personal ideas"; for he demonstrates that the social person is a "psychic fact," a "group of sentiments attached to some symbol." A group of sentiments, mind you. Mark well the phrase for future use in gauging the emotional reactions of the spectator. For here is disclosed a basic principle in the spreading of ideals, in the contagion of virtues or vices, in the epidemic of degrading or of uplifting suggestions. If for me another social person consists in my idea of his characteristics, tested by certain personal symbols stored in my mind as standards of spiritual values, ready to obey the call of associative memory, how very practical it is that through education these symbols be wisely selected. "To think of love, gratitude, pity, grief, honor, courage, justice, and the like," says Cooley in illustration of his theory, "it is necessary to think of people by whom or toward whom these sentiments may be entertained. Thus justice may be recalled by thinking of Washington, kindness by Lincoln, honor by Sir Philip Sidney." ASSOCIATION OF RIGHT IDEAS BUILDS RIGHT CHARACTER The present application is obvious. What if the symbols by which the youth learns to test personal merits be the traits or actions of his heroes or heroines of the stage, the classroom, the athletic field, or some other spectacle? Especially at puberty the boy or the girl lays in a rich store of ideals and heroes. It really seems as if the factors of such thought-processes are social products: images arising in emotional states under stimulus of new associations. THE KIND OF IDEAS ASSOCIATED IN CONSCIOUSNESS DETERMINES THE KIND OF CHARACTER Here is a "law" of social psychology which it will richly repay the teacher to exploit. How vivid, how enduring must be the motion-picture stamped on the film of associative memory, of consciousness, under stress of the surging emotions that sway the joyous recreation-crowd. A SPECTATOR IS A MINIATURE SOCIETY Accordingly, as a net result of the foregoing analysis, the spectator appears, not as the wholly imaginary isolated being of conventional phrase, but as a composite social-psychic personality. In a vital sense, he is a miniature society; a veritable microcosm or epitome of the macrocosm of the larger society which itself is a psychic fact. THE SPECTATOR IS SWAYED BY EMOTION Now, the spectator-personality is dominated by his feelings, by his emotions; and the emotions are the most powerful springs of |