806 SOCIOLOGY 



logy of group organization and activity which demands nothing less 

 than a renovation of the assumptions of all the social sciences. The 

 "consent of the governed" theory, the theory of value, the ideas of 

 property, sovereignty, inalienable rights, free-will, must all reckon 

 with social psychology. Indeed, there are those who go so far as to 

 say that sociology as a science will turn out to be nothing else than 

 this psychology of association. 



This psychical nature of the group suggests another fundamental 

 problem that of the individual and society. Of Comte it has 

 been said that he regarded the individual as an abstraction and 

 society as the only reality. 1 On the other hand, it might be fairly 

 asserted that the thorough-going individualists of the English school 

 saw only persons, and thought of society itself as the abstraction. 

 With Comte the family, not the individual, was the unit of the 

 social organism. Spencer, in spite of occasional aberrations in favor 

 of the family, represented the individual as corresponding to the 

 cell in the animal body. Speneer's political views made him adhere 

 to a conventional individualism not always congruous with the bio- 

 logical analogy. His influence told, therefore, in favor of the older 

 idea of the individual as a reflecting, calculating unit, consciously 

 cooperating in society for his own ends, and nicely weighing his 

 own interests against those of his fellows. All the political philosophy 

 of Rousseau, mediated through the French Revolution, chimed 

 with this theory of the individual. Oddly enough, the "great-man" 

 doctrine of Carlyle aroused Spencer to the defense of his biological 

 conception of social evolution. In demonstrating the continuity 

 of this process and vindicating the uniformity of causation, Spencer 

 was obliged to explain the "great man" as a product of his age and 

 social group a theory which did not always jump with the impli- 

 cations of his political creed. Before this discussion was dropped, 

 William James, 2 Fiske, 3 and Grant Allen 4 had been drawn into the 

 lists. The latter in his Psychology dealt with the "social self" in a 

 suggestive and enlightening way. 5 This was the first of a series of 

 studies by various scholars which have radically modified the con- 

 cepts of the individual and of personality. The same problem was 

 also partially involved in the attempt of Mackenzie to abstract 

 the organic idea from the biological sociology. 6 One of the elements 

 of this organic idea is "an intrinsic relation between the part and 

 the whole," i. e., the person and society. The essential idea in 



1 Barth, loc. tit., p. 55. 



2 James, Great Men, Great Thoughts and the Environment, Atlantic Monthly, 

 October, 1880. 



3 Fiske, Sociology and Hero Worship, ibid., January, 1881. 



4 Allen, The Genesis of Genius, ibid., March, 1881. 



1 James, Psychology (New York, 1890), vol. i, pp. 291-295. 



8 Mackenzie, Introduction to Social Philosophy (New York, 1890), pp. 127-182. 



