Note 975 — Chapter VI · SCIENCE AND COMMUNAL POETRY

Even Mr. Spencer points out that this is no bar to communal consent, Sociology, I. 59; for the variability implies “smaller departure from primitive reflex action ... lack of the re-representative emotions which hold the simpler ones in check.” Bastian, too, has shown that in the formation of society out of individuals, the social element as such, the social whole, must precede the element of social individuality or of the individuality within the mass. This is what one gathers from Bastian’s books in general; in one case, Die Welt in ihren Spiegelungen unter dem Wandel des Völkergedankens, p. 413, he applies this idea to the priority of social property as compared with individual property.