332 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XI. No. 270. 



over : once as value to be realized, and once 

 as mechanism of realization. So long as 

 custom reigns, as tradition prevails, so long 

 as social values are determined by instinct 

 and habit, there is no conscious question as 

 to the method of their achievement, and 

 hence no need of psychology. Social insti- 

 tutions work of their own inertia, they take 

 the individual up into themselves and carry 

 him along in their own sweep. The indi- 

 vidual is dominated by the mass life of his 

 group. Institutions and the customs at- 

 taching to them take care of society both as 

 to its ideals and its methods. But when 

 once the values come to consciousness, 

 when once a Socrates insists upon the or- 

 ganic relation of a reflective life and mo- 

 rality, then the means, the machinery by 

 which ethical ideas are projected and mani- 

 fested, comes to consciousness also. Psy- 

 chology must needs be born as soon as mo- 

 rality becomes reflective. 



Moreover, psychology, as an account of 

 the mechanism of workings of personality, 

 is the only alternative to an arbitrary and 

 class view of society, to an aristocratic 

 view in the sense of restricting the realiza- 

 tion of the full worth of life to a section of 

 society. The growth of a psychology that, 

 as applied to history and sociology, tries to 

 state the interactions of groups of men in 

 familiar psychical categories of stimulus 

 and inhibition, is evidence that we are 

 ceasing to take existing social forms as final 

 and unquestioned. The application of psy- 

 chology to social institutions is the only 

 scientific way of dealing with their ethical 

 values in their present unequal distribu- 

 tion, their haphazard execution and their 

 thwarted development. It marks just the 

 recognition of the principle of sufficient 

 reason in the large matters of social life. 

 It is the recognition that the existing order 

 is determined neither by fate nor by chance, 

 but is based on law and order, on a system 

 of existing stimuli and modes of reaction, 



through knowledge of which we can modify 

 the practical outcome. There is no logical 

 alternative save either to recognize and 

 search for the mechanism of the interplay 

 of personalities that controls the existing 

 distributions of values, or to accept as final 

 a fixed hierarchy of persons in which the 

 leaders assert, on no basis save their own 

 supposed superior personality, certain ends 

 and laws which the mass of men passively 

 receive and imitate. The effort to apply 

 psychology to social affairs means that the 

 determination of ethical values lies not in 

 any set or class, however superior, but in 

 the workings of the social whole ; that the 

 explanation is found in the complex inter- 

 actions and interrelations which constitute 

 this whole. To save personality in all, we 

 must serve all alike — state the achieve- 

 ments of all in terms of mechanism, that is, 

 of the exercise of reciprocal influence. To 

 affirm personality independent of mechan- 

 ism is to restrict its full meaning to a few, 

 and to make its expression in the few ir- 

 regular and arbitrary. 



The anomaly in our present social life 

 is obvious enough. With tremendous in- 

 crease in control of nature, in ability to 

 utilize nature for the indefinite extension 

 and multiplication of commodities for hu- 

 man use and satisfaction, we find the actual 

 realization of ends, the enjoyment of values 

 growing unassured and precarious. At 

 times it seems as if we were caught in a 

 contradiction ; the more we multiply means, 

 the less certain and general is the use we 

 are able to make of them. No wonder a 

 Carlyle or a Euskin puts our whole indus- 

 trial civilization under a ban, while a Tol- 

 stoi proclaims a return to the desert. But 

 the only way to see the situation steadily, 

 and to see it as a whole, is to keep in mind 

 that the entire problem is one of the de- 

 velopment of science, and of its application 

 to life. Our control of nature with the ac- 

 companying output of material commodities 



