Note 116 — Chapter IX

Professor C. A. Elwood, in the essay mentioned supra, Some Prolegomena to Social Psychology, is the first, so far as I know, to apply Professor Dewey's psychological viewpoint to the study of the social mind. Chap. ii of his book contains a very excellent brief discussion of this point. Without going into the matter at length, it must suffice to say here that the new viewpoint stresses the significance of mental processes for activity, for the adjustment of the organism to its environment, rather than the structure or content of the mental process. It stresses impulse, instinct, habit, etc., and refuses to undertake a synthetic process, which strives to get some sort of mechanical unity by combining abstract, structural elements. The unifying principle in mind is activity, function. Professor Elwood holds that, while the individual mind has unity both of structure and of function, the social mind has a unity of function only. I think the contrast is not so sharp as that. There is some structural unity in the social mind, there are points of identity among individual minds, common ideals, and a common—even though small—body of knowledge, especially in very elementary matters. And the unity of the individual mind is primarily a unity of function. Certainly—and there is no issue with Professor Elwood here!—there is no unifying "soul-substance" lying back of the psychic activities organized in the single individual mind. And the analogy between the mind of an individual and the mind of society is not intended to read into the social mind any of the hypothetical character which an absolutistic, preëvolutionary metaphysics ascribed to the individual mind, but rather—in so far as the issue is raised at all—to divest the individual mind of just that hypothetical character. Cf. Friedrich Paulsen's Introduction to Philosophy, on "soul-substance," and Wundt's Völker-Psychologie, vol. i, chap. i.