800 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
producing of the mother by the baby, to the producing of mer- chant and soldier by the world-powers, and the producing of the world-powers by merchant and soldier.
The "social," then, is the reciprocity and the reciprocality between the persons that live and move and have their being as centers of reaction in a world filled with like centers. Here is the material for the "organic concept." It gets its meaning as the antithesis of the atomistic individualistic philosophy. We are what we are by virtue of the fact that other men from the remote past and from the immediate present are continually depositing a part of themselves in us, and taking a part of us into their make-up in return.' This interaction of persons is the realm of the social. It is the next higher order of complexity above that set of reac- tions which we call the individual consciousness.
Tennyson gave us a picture of the "Two Voices" in the same personality — a very slight variation in detail upon Paul's psycho- logical analysis of himself : " For the good that I would I do not ; but the evil that I would not, that I do."' Each man is in himself a society, not of two, but of innumerable voices, each striving for utterance, but composing themselves into some resultant activity that stands for the algebraic total of stimulus and response in each particular case.^ Two men become a society in which conditions that were possible in the consciousness of each without contact with another personal factor now have to compose themselves with reactions set in motion by contact of each with the other.
The social, then, is all the give-and-take«^5i there is, whether more or less, between the persons anywhere in contact. The
■ I hope to be forgiven for a figure that harks back toward the notion of stuff, rather than process, as the reality behind associational phenomena. No one will feel the difficulty but the psychologists, and I trust them to accept my word that 1 do not mean to press the figure to that length.
'Rom. vii : 19.
3 Afterthis was written and discussed in seminar, I happened upon Tarde's remark {Les transformations dupouvoir, p. 196) : " II y a deux sortes d'associations : premifere- ment, celle des divers esprits individuels unis en soci^td; en second lieu, celle en chacun d'eux, des ^tats de conscience qui s'y sont peu i peu agr^gds et qui lui provien- nent, pour la plupart, d'autres esprits. En chaque esprit individuel se r^pfete plus ou moins cette agr^gation plus ou moins syst^matique d'^tats de conscience qui con- stitue le type social."
