868 SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 



corresponding with the epochs in race-development. Pedagogy 

 is actually operating on the assumption of such a parallelism. It 

 may well be, however, that the whole assumption is a misappre- 

 hension. There is another view that the brain like the body of 

 man was made up in the earliest times on a successful principle, 

 and that it has not changed materially since, showing merely a 

 capacity to manage new problems as they have arisen in the out- 

 side world, using motor, perceptual, and coordinative processes 

 more in the earlier, and abstract processes more in the later, stages 

 of development. If this view is correct, the brain of the child re- 

 capitulates the brain of the race only in the sense that the accu- 

 mulated knowledge and standpoint of the race are so presented 

 to him, and with such urgency and system that habits are broken 

 up and reformed rapidly, and the mind transformed, in no bio- 

 logical sense, but only in the sense that the attention and the con- 

 tent of the mind are made correspondent with the world as it is at 

 present. Social psychology must cooperate with psychology and 

 anthropology in determining the principles underlying mental 

 growth in the race and in the individual before the science of edu- 

 cation can make any sure progress. 



The view of the province of social psychology here presented 

 has at least the merit of suggesting a field of operations not occu- 

 pied by other sciences. It is not claimed that the materials used 

 are entirely new, nor that the problems arising here may not arise 

 in connection with other sciences also. But, after all, there is but 

 one reality, and a new science never represented anything more 

 than a new direction of the attention. The legitimacy of viewing 

 the same materials from different standpoints can hardly be ques- 

 tioned when we consider that the human brain is studied by 

 psychology, anthropology, physiology, anatomy, pathology, and 

 embryology, and that experience has shown this differentiation of 

 attention in the study of the brain to be precisely the method 

 yielding the best results. It is, indeed, the scientific procedure 

 corresponding with the division of labor in the industrial pursuits 

 and in the professions; and the differentiation of a social psycho- 

 logy from the sciences of psychology, sociology, anthropology, 

 ethnology, folk-lore, and history, with a class of specialists giving 

 their attention to the extension of psychology to the region of 

 social phenomena, will yield, we may hope, results supplementary 

 to those secured by these sciences, and of importance to the study 

 of life and society. 



