356 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
association is the process of realizing the subjective content of the associates. Association is implicit objectification of that which is in the minds of the associates. Association is practical adjustment between the subjective and the objective conditions of the persons associated. More simply still, the members of any association have certain notions in common. Their asso- ciation is the common response to the stimulus of these notions. No association is merely the football of external conditions, whether social or physical. Each association is what it is by virtue of a common spiritual possession. The fact ought to be too clear for serious dispute. The only open question pertains to the propriety or utility of naming the fact "subjective envi- ronment."
XI. A social consciousness. Tarde has remarked:
It is not true that there is a social mind distinct from individual minds, and in which the individual minds are contained as the ideas are within the individual mind. This is an entirely chimerical idea of social psychology. The social mind, like the individual mind, includes nothing but ideas states of consciousness. The states of consciousness that make up the social mind are scattered among the individuals that make up the society. They are not assembled in one brain. This difference should be neither exagger- ated nor ignored. There are two sorts of associations : first, that of different individual minds united in the society ; second, that in each of them of states of consciousness which accumulate gradually, and proceed for the most part from other minds. In each individual man there is reproduced to a certain extent that more or less systematic aggregation of states of consciousness that constitutes the social type. The social mind consists in this very repetition?
Mention of the incident "social consciousness" is the signal for attacks at various points along the sociological line. What is social consciousness ? Where is it ? Does it have a place in every human association ? Is it merely a late and rare develop- ment ? It is not necessary at this point to enter very far into formulation of all that answer to these questions would involve ; but it will be an advance for all the social sciences when we shall have perceived that a reality is here recorded, and when we shall have resolved to make due account of all that the reality contains.
1 Les transformations du pouvoir, p. 197.
