clumsy figure we may say literally that the sociologist has the task of formulating man in his associational self-assertions. The psychologist has the task of formulating man in the mechanism of his self-assertions.[1]
As was said above, our ability to look out over the field of human association, and to reproduce it in thought, however imperfectly, is due, in large part, to the conventional social sciences. The supposition now to be proposed, for the sake of varied statement of our main proposition, is accordingly strained as well as extravagant, but it will serve a certain purpose. Let us suppose that all human activities had occurred precisely as we observe them, with the exception of the activities which may be called collectively the social sciences. Suppose that men had associated precisely as we know them to have associated, with the one modification that they did no systematic thinking about association. We should have then industry, government, society, but we should have no political economy, political science, history, social philosophy. We should have at most records, chronicles of bare events, with no conventional classifications and interpretations of the events. Suppose that at this moment the process of social self-examination begins. Association becomes introspective. Certain men begin to feel scientific and philosophic curiosity about the human activities, some of which they see, and more of which they know by record. The
- ↑ The conceptions which these last paragraphs try to fix are not the property of any one individual, certainly not my own. So far as I can trace my share of them to definite sources, they are due largely to a sort of telepathic communication for seven years with my colleagues of the philosophical department of the University of Chicago, and to Professor J. Mark Baldwin's Social and Ethical Interpretations. My debt to the latter source is none the less clear, although I am unable to adopt all of Professor Baldwin's conclusions. For instance, I am disposed to dissent from his views on three out of the four cases of the "extra-social" which he specifies in this Journal, Vol. IV, pp. 650 sq. As a sample of the former sort of stimulus a recent remark by Professor Dewey may be quoted: "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 interactions and interrelations which constitute this whole. To save personality in all we must serve all alike — state the achievements of all in terms of mechanism, that is, of the exercise of reciprocal influence. To affirm personality independent of mechanism is to restrict its full meaning to a few, and to make its expression in the few irregular and arbitrary." (Psychological Review, March, 1900, p. 123.)
