788 SOCIOLOGY 



''good-fellowship," "pleasurable consorting together," or mean- 

 ing the individuals, collectively regarded, that consort. Examples 

 of society in this original sense are afforded by the commingling of 

 familiar spirits at the tavern or the club, the casual association 

 of chance acquaintances at the summer resort, the numberless 

 more formal "functions" of "the season." In the second signi- 

 fication of the word, "society" is a group of individuals cooperat- 

 ing for the achievement of any object of common interest or utility, 

 as, for example, a merchant guild, an industrial corporation, a 

 church, a Congress of Arts and Science. Finally, in the third signi- 

 fication of the word, "society" is a group of individuals dwelling 

 together and sharing many interests of life in common. A nest of 

 ants, a savage horde, a confederation of barbarian tribes, a hamlet 

 or village, a city-state, a national state, a federal empire all 

 these are societies within the third and comprehensive definition 

 of the term. A scientific conception of society must lie within the 

 boundaries fixed by these three familiar meanings, but it must 

 seize upon and make explicit the essential fact, whatever it may 

 be, that is a common element in all social relations. 



At the present time we find in sociological literature two com- 

 peting conceptions of the essential nature of society. They are 

 known respectively as the organic and the psychological concep- 

 tion. 



The organic conception assumes that the group of individuals 

 dwelling and working together is the true, or typical, society, and 

 that it is as much a unity, although made up of individuals, as 

 is the animal or the vegetable body, composed of cells and differ- 

 entiated into mutually dependent tissues and organs. Sketched 

 in bold outlines by Herbert Spencer in his essay on The Social 

 Organism in 1860, the organic conception has been elaborated by 

 Schaffle and Lilienfeld, and is to-day accepted as the w r orking 

 hypothesis of an able group of French sociologists, whose work 

 appears in the proceedings of L'Institut international de Sociologie. 



The psychological conception assumes that, whether or not 

 the organic conception be true and of scientific importance, it fails 

 to get to the bottom of things. It assumes that, even if society 

 is an organism, there is necessarily some interaction of individual 

 with individual, or some form of activity common to all individuals, 

 which serves to bind them together in helpful and pleasurable rela- 

 tions, and that this activity, instead of being merely physical, like 

 the cohesion of material cells, is a mental phenomenon. It assumes 

 that all social bonds may be resolved into some common activity 

 or some interactivity of individual minds. It is, in short, a view 

 of society as a mode of mental activity. 



This is the psychological conception in general terms. It takes, 



