PROBLEMS OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 871 



atmosphere, because everything else is seen through that medium. 

 So it took a long time to discover the existence of subjective en- 

 vironments, because the social life of man was seen through the 

 refracting prejudices inspired by some one of these environments. 

 If at last the thinker is coming to appreciate the lordly r61e of social 

 groupings, it is because the fuller accounts of man in space 

 ethnology and in time history afford so broad a basis for 

 comparison that he can now lift himself above the narrow horizon 

 of his date and place. 



The union of men concerns us here, not because they flourish 

 through their cooperation, but because their natures are corre- 

 spondingly modified. The principles of organization, indeed, in- 

 terest the social morphologist, but so long as associates remain 

 quite self-centred, and cold-bloodedly look upon their society as 

 a mere piece of mechanism helpful in the gaining of their private 

 ends, there is nothing about their union to challenge the social 

 psychologist. The fact is, however, that society reacts upon, trans- 

 forms, even socializes its members. Properties appear which the 

 elements in the beginning did not possess. It can be established, 

 for instance, that the intellectual and moral traits of any group- 

 unit depend not only upon the original characters of the units, 

 but also upon two other things upon their mode of combina- 

 tion a morphological fact and their manner of interaction 

 a psychological fact. The true community at once enlarges 

 and imprisons minds. The individual ceases to look upon his fel- 

 low cooperators as tools, his union with them as means to an end. 

 A consciousness of his group seizes upon him, and, whether we 

 regard this striking obsession as a monstrous soul-parasite or as 

 a noble graft upon an inferior stock, there is no question that we 

 are in the presence of a super-individual phenomenon. The coin- 

 cident ideas men have of their group become a spiritual structure, 

 the group-individuality, which trenches upon, even overshadows 

 and well-nigh supplants, their personal individuality. 



The problem of social groupings is distinct from that of personal 

 relations. Although it is inter-individual action that extends 

 through a population a plane of agreement, such as a common 

 speech, religion, or culture, a plane which, to be sure, often serves 

 as a convenient platform on which to rear some fabric of collective 

 life, it does not follow that a group-unit is built up out of nothing 

 but personal ties, that the bond between fellow members must be 

 some one of the relations that may be established between two 

 individuals. In that case a society, however complex and stable, 

 would be resolvable into couples, each exemplifying some type of 

 reciprocal influence that can be observed between man and man. 

 No doubt there is much social tissue where people are webbed 



