Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/23

THE RELATION OF SOCIOLOGY TO PHILOSOPHY. 7 4. In the present condition of Sociology it appears need- less to insist on that difference of method between social science and Philosophy which has arisen from a confusion between the claims of intelligence to deal rationally with social phenomena, and the idea that " subjection to natural law " or rational coherence implied causation of the same type as natural causation. It is worth while, however, to point out that on this aspect of social problems the relation of man to his environment, or the degree in which man is the creature of circumstance, the new social science had much to learn from the ethical and political philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. The distinction between determination by law and determination by the presentation of law, and the relation of the conscious motive embodied in a political order to the facts and modes of behaviour existent in natural surroundings and economic arrangements, are stated with perfect balance and clearness by Plato and Aristotle. Many one-sided constructions of social causation might never have been attempted had due attention been paid to their ideas. On the other hand, it is of interest to note that the force of facts appears to be determining Sociology to the position of a psychological science, as indeed Mill, in the sixth book of the Logic, fully intended it to be. The Psychology of Crowds, the idea of Imitation as the ultimate characteristic of Social Wholes, or the conception of the Consciousness of Kind as the central attribute of Society, bring us into contact with ideas with which political or social philosophy has long been accustomed to work. But while we recognise in these notions an approximation to philosophical thoughts, we cannot but wonder that so little use should be made by Social Science of the resources to which it now seems to hold the key. The psychology of a crowd is not even the psychology of a committee, much less of a representative assembly or of a great state. The working of an organised psychical unity of this kind has at least been more suggestively sketched by Plato in his commonwealth or by Aristotle in his idea of the thinker's function, than by any modern Sociologist. Yet M. Bernes, I observe, rests altogether on the commonplace and popular view of Aristotle's notion of the thinker's life. Imitation again is a bald and partial rendering of that complex reciprocal reference which constitutes social co- operation. To say that imitation is the characteristic of society is like saying that repetition is the soul of design, whereas even symmetry is incompatible with a principle so elementary as repetition. If one man holds a ham- mer on a rivet and another strikes it, that is conscious