THE BEGINNINGS OF SOCIAL REACTION IN MAN 

 AND LOWER ANIMALS. 



By C. L. Herrick, 



Socorro, New Mexico. 



It seems to be easy to employ the word "social" in a very 

 slip-shod manner and it may very well be that greater care in 

 its definition would remove several bones of contention that are 

 being worried from time to time in the journals. 



When we admit that human experience "polarizes" (to 

 use Professor Baldwin's expression) into £;^c? and ^r//rr extremes, 

 it becomes necessary very carefully to guard what is meant by 

 the social self or social consciousness. Clifford, and other 

 writers since, have written of a tribal conscience or tribal self. 

 Such expressions may easily be interpreted as though society 

 were possessed of a consciousness in the same sense that the in- 

 dividual is. Now this is, of course, nonsense, or rather, a fre- 

 quently exposed fallacy. 



When we speak of the social self we mean the social re- 

 flected in the individual or else we mean an abstraction of common 

 elements in the individual selves constituting the society, which 

 common factors we may thereafter use, like an algebraic ex- 

 pression, as though it had an independent existence. .It would 

 be of immense advantage in simplifying philosophical and an- 

 thropological inquiry if some sort of an agreement could be 

 reached as to the use of words in this connection. Ought we 

 not carefully to distinguish the two elements just referred to ? 

 Let us, for example, call the first the "socius consciousness," 

 meaning thereby all that portion of our conscious acts which in- 

 volves the recognition of other-in-self and self-in-other, or if the 

 line cannot be drawn, our conscious acts in so far as this impli- 

 cation is under consideration. Let the second element be 



