OF SOCIETy. 



437 



profitably rewritten.^ All this simply means that 

 sociology has become not only as the study of the 

 collective interests of society and mankind, but also 

 in its bearing upon other philosophical and scientific 

 problems, an important and leading doctrine. 



But there is a second and far more serious cause n. 



Ethical 



which has been operative in the course of the last fifty interest in 



^ '' sociology. 



years in pushing into the foreground the problem of 

 human society and the study of sociology. This, in 



' The clearest indication of this 

 doctrine, which we may term the 

 doctrine of the two selves — the 

 Self as Consciousness, containing 

 the whole world - picture in the 

 mirror of an individual mind (the 

 firmament of the Soul), and the 

 Self as one among a great many 

 other selves, a unit in the society 

 of other units and in the environ- 

 ment of many things — seems to me 

 to be given in some articles of 

 Josiah Royce contained in vols. iii. 

 and iv. of ' The American Philo- 

 sophical Review' (1894-95). "Just 

 as there is no conscious Egoism 

 without some distinctly social ref- 

 erence, so there is, on the whole, 

 in us men, no self-consciousness 

 apart from some more or less 

 derived form of the social con- 

 sciousness. I am I in relation to 

 some sort of a non-Ego. And, as 

 a fact, the non-Ego that I am 

 accustomed to deal with when I 

 think and act, is primarily some 

 real or ideal finite fellow -being, in 

 actual or possible social relations 

 with me, and this social non-Ego, 

 real or ideal, is only secondarily to 

 be turned into anything else, as, 

 for example, into a natural object 

 that I regard as a mere dead 

 thing. . . . As it is not true that 

 we are primarily and in unsocial 



abstraction merely egoistic, just so 

 it is not true that we primarily 

 know merely our own inner life as 

 individuals, apart from an essenti- 

 ally social contrast with other 

 minds" [loc. cit., vol. iv. p. 470). 

 In the sequel of these Articles, the 

 writer dwells on Memory, Anticipa- 

 tion, and Imitation as the funda- 

 mental functions of the infant 

 mind in leading it, as it were, 

 out of itself and conceiving itself 

 as one among others. It seems to 

 me that sufficient importance is not 

 attached to language or intersub- 

 jective communication, and the 

 same criticism seems to me to 

 apply likewise to James Ward's 

 doctrine of the "presentation con- 

 tinuum." As stated already (see 

 vol. iii., chap. 3, p. 291), the 

 doctrine of the " presentation con- 

 tinuum," as well as William James' 

 conception of the " stream of 

 thought," marks a real advance in 

 psychology ; but a new problem 

 suggests itself : How is the con- 

 tinuum or the steady flow broken 

 up into discontinuities 1 a pi-oblem 

 analogous to that in physical science, 

 given that the universe is a plenum, 

 a continuum. How are we to con- 

 ceive of those discontinuities in it 

 without the existence of which 

 nothing would happen ? 



