PROVINCE OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 867 



and play; the bearing on social activity of ornament, dancing, 

 painting, sculpture, poetry, music, and intoxicants; and to what 

 extent an organic attitude of sensitiveness to the opinion of others 

 (an attitude of mind essential to the control of the individual by 

 society) had its origin in courtship and to what extent in the food- 

 activities. 



A comparison of the educational systems of the lower and higher 

 stages of culture will assist the social psychologist in determining 

 to what extent the consciousness of a group and the group-pecul- 

 iarities on the mental side are organic, and to what extent they 

 are bound up with the nature of the knowledge and tradition trans- 

 mitted from one generation to another. There cannot be a high 

 state of mind in a society where the state of knowledge is low, and 

 if a group has not accumulated a body of scientific knowledge, 

 through specialized attention and specialized occupation, it cannot 

 pass knowledge on. And doubtless the low mental condition of 

 some groups is not due to lack of native intelligence, but to lack of 

 the proper copies for imitation. The Chinese, for example, are a 

 race of great mental power, but they have no logic, no mathematics 

 to speak of, no science, no history in the scientific sense, no know- 

 ledge worth the name only precedent, and rule, and precept. 

 It is therefore unthinkable that the Chinese individual should be 

 well educated or intelligent in the Western sense, however assidu- 

 ously he attends his school, since there is no organized body of 

 knowledge which he can get possession of. At the same time, the 

 member of this society may be able to master any knowledge in 

 the possession of any group, if given access to it. In a study of this 

 character we have therefore an opportunity to distinguish between 

 the mental state of the individual and the state of knowledge in the 

 group. Neither the Eastern question, nor the Negro question, nor 

 questions of crime and social reform, nor of pedagogy, can be safely 

 approached unless we make this distinction between the mind of 

 the individual and the state of culture in his group. 



Perhaps the most urgent of all demands on social psychology 

 at the present moment comes from psychology and pedagogy, and 

 is for a more definite and scientific statement on the question of 

 epochs in social development, and the relation between stages of de- 

 velopment in the consciousness of the individual and epochs of 

 culture. There is an anthropological theory that there have been 

 more or less clearly marked stages of social development, char- 

 acterized by equally marked activities, and mental conditions 

 corresponding with the types of activity prevalent in the different 

 epochs. Psychology assumes further that there is 'a parallelism 

 between the mental growth of the child and these culture-epochs 

 that the child passes in a recapitulatory way through phases 



