THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY 619 



personal convictions that hindered his coming into the psychological 

 heritage as well. As it was, the spirit of his teaching awaited its 

 working-out in a later generation. It was to the profit of sociology; 

 for his negative answer to the question of positive psychology was 

 possible only because of his affirmative answer to that of social 

 science. The positive bearing of Comtean positivism comes out, 

 therefore, in two ways: first, as announcing a general method, and 

 second, as preparing the way for a social psychology which should 

 reconstitute part of the domain assigned to sociology that of 

 psychic and social experience in a separate science. 



As to this latter undertaking, the isolation of the content of 

 social psychology, the requirement had already been met, in 

 spirit at least, by Jean Jacques Rousseau. In Rousseau, to whom 

 French naturalism owes its main impulse, we find two contrasted 

 and in a sense opposing points of view, one positive and the other 

 negative. These together tended to the segregation of a certain sort 

 of material. These positions were, first, the positive " return to 

 nature," which took the form of individualism in politics and educa- 

 tion (in The Social Contract, and Emile), and, second, the theory of the 

 " general will," which opened the way for a new collectivism, when- 

 ever its implications for social psychology should be brought out. 



These positions of his predecessor might have led Comte into a 

 truer view, and have brought about the establishing of a social 

 psychology a science of the " general will" - in the spirit of the 

 motto " back to nature." But this, as we have seen, Comte did not 

 realize. 



Undoubtedly, however, there is a profounder reason for the im- 

 mediate unfruitfulness of the work of Comte and this is my justi- 

 fication for dwelling so long upon it. Pursuing the method employed 

 above, we may still recognize the requirement that the science of 

 mind follow the genetic stages of the individual's growth in self- 

 consciousness. With this cue, we may say that it was impossible 

 that a psychology of social collectivism could be established before 

 a theory of psychic individualism had been fully worked out. The 

 individual is, indeed, truly a social person from the start; but this 

 he himself does not recognize until he has lived through a period 

 of strenuous unreflective self-assertion. Moreover, even then this 

 consciousness of his social place is not in itself the adequate impulse 

 to the theoretical interest to explain it. So social psychology, which 

 embodies just such an interest, must perforce await the development 

 of individual psychology and then serve to supplement it. We are 

 able to see this now, inasmuch as we are only now realizing the 

 transition from the latter to the former; and it is for this reason, 

 also, that we are able to see why it was that both in France and in 

 England the repeated claim of collectivism, both social and political, 



