PROLEGOMENA TO SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 227
to State them. Yet many of the decriers of social psychology have made social psychologists guilty of saying the very opposite. Neither do these propositions affect in any way the truth of the propositions previously advanced concerning the nature of the social mind and social consciousness. What social psychology stands for — and accordingly also the concepts "social mind" and "social consciousness" — is the perception that a single process may go on through several "centers of experience." The admission of this truth is the admission of all that the terms "social mind" and "social consciousness" essentially impl)'. Of the three possible meanings of the phrase "social consciousness," then, the two first mentioned are alone legitimate from the standpoint of reality. The first is perhaps in strictest accord with the definition given of the social mind, while the sec- ond has the advantage of both popular and scientific usage, and of standing for a peculiar manifestation of the societary life.
The concept of the social mind, then, is not meaningless, although it does not mean that society presents a unified con- sciousness, much less that it is ruled over by a mysterious entity resembling the "soul" of theology and metaphysics. The con- tent to be given to the concept is, as we have seen, that of a process which unites the processes of many minds into a functional whole, and which mediates the activities of the group as a whole. It is to be regarded as an expression of the com- mon organic life-process of the group, of the fact that the group constitutes an organic functional unity, not as something imposed upon, or separate from, the life-process. The social mind is a convenient name, therefore, for the psychical side of the societary life-process considered in its unity, and is a well-nigh indispensable term in social psychology for referring to the unity which must be thought of as the subject of psychical changes in the societary life. With this conception of the social mind the meaning of such terms as "social consciousness," the "popularwill," the "Zeitgeist," "public opinion," etc., becomes clear, while social psychology is freed from any taint of mysticism and becomes as positivistic in its spirit as modern individual psychology.
.T- tT ,- Charles A. Ellwood.
The University of Chicago. v-ji/ir.i-i-j ^^. ^±-±-^1^^^.
