urgent practical problems are concerned with the striving aspect of human nature. The most fundamental task of the educator is to awaken an interest in and a desire for knowledge and selfdevelopment. The psychiatrist must study and redirect if possible the conflicting desires of his patient, his subconscious as well as his conscious motives and impulses.

The personnel manager is chiefly concerned with incentives, rewards, jealousies, rivalries, discontents, loyalties, ambitions, and aspirations. The lawyer, the judge and the jurymen are primarily concerned to determine motives, intentions, and responsibility. The politician, the economist and the moralist are, or should be, primarily concerned with relative values and the means to make real or actual the highest values of mankind by harmonizing and coördinating the conflicting motives of our social life.

In all these cases a psychology that ignores the all-pervading purposiveness of human life is of no use; for, if it is consistent, important words that are essential to the intelligent discussion of human affairs (such words are motive, intention, desire, will, responsibility, aspiration, ideal, striving, effort, interest) are of no meaning for it; or, if they are used with a meaning so thin and so different from ordinary discourse, that profitable converse with the practical man is impossible.

. . . Instead of accepting the abstract conceptions of physical science and attempting to build up from them a plausible mechanical dummy which shall stand for man in our science, let us frankly acknowledge that man is that thing in all the world with which we have the most intimate acquaintance. Let us begin by accepting him for what he seems to be, a thinking being that strives to attain the goals he desires, to realize his ideals, sometimes succeeding, often failing but always striving so long as he lives. Let us try to understand the history of these tendencies to strive as they are revealed in the individual and the species; to understand more nearly our knowing, our imagining. our recollecting, our judging and reasoning as they serve us in our strivings for the attainment of our goals.

As we progress with this task, let us cautiously extend the same principles of explanation to the animals of successively lower levels. And, when in this way we shall have gained some understanding of the life of the animalcule, we shall, perhaps, be able to begin to understand the physiology of the complex organism in its broader aspects. Instead of trying to illuminate human society by likening it to an animal mechanism, as was

the fashion of the nineteenth century, we may find that we can profitably invert the process, that we can illuminate the complex organism by likening it to a well-organized, harmonious human society, a society which can adjust itself to a thousand disturbances and can recover itself from grave disorders just because and in so far as each member, endowed with limited powers of adaptation, steadfastly strives always to achieve the goal prescribed by his own nature and by his active relations with all his fellow-citizens.

But here we shall be met again by the cry "You are not scientific. . . for you are disregarding the fundamental postulate of all science, namely, that all events are strictly determined, that mechanistic causation rules universally." To this we can only reply by exhorting him once more to have courage, assuring him "that not all propositions made by all philosophers are true, neither does a proposition become true through being frequently repeated."

Let us be content to postpone metaphysics and to start out from two indisputable empirical facts: first, the fact that sometimes men create new things, such as great works of art and literature and new scientific formulæ. Secondly, the fact that when the normal man simply and strongly desires a certain end and perceives certain bodily movements to be means to that end, those movements follow upon that desire and that perception. Here are well-established empirical generalizations from which we may confidently start out, refusing to be held up by questions at present insoluble, such as-How can consciousness deflect the path of a single molecule in my brain. Answers to such questions are quite unnecessary as foundations for purposive psychology. It is in the highest degree probable that as science progresses it will become clear that such insoluble questions have been wrongly stated and should never have been asked.

Let us not deny ourselves the right to build up a psychology that may be of use and value to our fellow-workers in the social sciences, because we cannot at present answer the most difficult of all questions. The physicist is equally non-plussed if you ask him comparable questions, such as-How does one molecule attract or repel another? . . . What is electricity? But he does not suspend his researches because his fundamental conceptions and assumptions are disputable and disputed, nor does he turn to some other branch of science in order to borrow from it others that have more prestige. Let us follow his example.

Let us gather our facts of human nature by objective and by introspective observation. Let us make our empirical generalizations and correlations of these facts, building up our own science in our own way. Let us boldly affirm that, just as the physical sciences do not proceed deductively from any system of exact abstract propositions, so also psychology, the most concrete of the sciences, is not required by any higher authority to accept or formulate any abstract propositions as an unchanging deductive basis.

It may be that eventually men of science will agree that there are in the universe two ultimately different kinds of process, the mechanistic and the purposive, the strictly determined and the creative, the physical and the mental. Or it may be that, eventually one of these may be shown to be merely an appearance of the other, an appearance due to the present limitations and imperfections of our understanding. At present we cannot decide this issue.

But if I attempt to guess at the future development of science, I incline to follow the lead of the most powerful intellects of all ages, and to predict that, if such resolution of the two types of process into one shall ever be achieved, the purposive type that we regard as the expression of mind will be found to be more real than the others.

3. The Social Character of Human Behavior, Feeling, and

Thinking

[ELLWOOD, Charles A., The Psychology of Human Society, pp. 108111. New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1925.]

We have seen that the mind of the individual has been evolved very largely as a social instrument, an instrument of adjustment in group life. So far as we can judge, this has been the history of mind from its very beginning. As we have seen, life has been group life because of biological necessities from the beginning. Individual behavior has been conditioned by a social situation through the whole history of its development. All the different elements or aspects of mind have been used to adjust individuals to their group and in their species from the start. The psychic elements of life, as far back as we can go in mental evolution, are a chief means of binding individuals of the same group or species together. The conclusion of social psychology is that the mind of man-that is, the complex of thoughts, feelings, desires, and impulses which we actually find in human

beings is very largely a product of social conditions. This is true even of the instincts and emotions with which we are equipped by heredity. Any study of these shows that they presuppose a social medium for their evolution. The instincts, emotions, and sensations of one individual often seem made to fit into corresponding processes in other individuals, and so to bind all together in a larger unity. Hence even these hereditary aspects of mind and behavior are socially conditioned.

It is even clearer that our acquired habits of behavior, feeling and thinking come largely from our group life. Through imitation and social pressure we get the vast majority of our habits. From the culture of our group we get not only our knowledge, our beliefs, our ideals, standards, and values, but even our precepts and our concepts, in the strict sense of those terms. We could scarcely know the meaning of the simplest object, at least not its cultural meaning, unless we shared in the culture of our group. Concepts, or abstract ideas, are also social in character; they denote or represent objects common to all members of the group. These very concepts, we have seen, have been transmitted. and developed through language. The most abstract thought is carried on by means of concepts or words, and it is largely in the nature of imaginary conversation. It, therefore, presupposes social life.

In a word, mind has been developed through the interaction of mind with mind in the carrying on and controlling of group life-processes. The mind has been used as a link between different members of the same group since mental life appeared. Mental life, therefore, belongs quite as much to the group as to the individual.1 Intercommunication is as necessary for the development of the mind of the individual as for the control of group life. If mental processes in the individual function to control individual behavior, it is not less true that intermental processes among the individuals of a group, such as suggestion, sympathy, imitation, and communication, function to control group behavior. If the mind is the chief organ of adaptation for the individual, then these forms of mental interstimulation and response are the means of adjustment between individuals and so the means of adjustment of group behavior. We may regard these forms of mental interstimulation and response as instru

1 Very rightly Professor Cooley made the fact that mind has two manifestations, one in individual life and the other in social life, both being aspects of the same process, one of the cornerstones of sociology. See Social Organization, Chap. i.

ments for the mutual adaptation of individuals who carry on common activities. But they are also the means for the development of the individual mind. Hence the individual and society develop together. The individual mind gets its development largely by participating in a group life, while the life of the group is carried on by mental interstimulation and response, chiefly in the form of intercommunication among its members. Therefore, man's mental and social life grow together and are largely one.

There is only one scientific conclusion which can be reached from these facts, and that is that the individual as we know him has been developed as a part of a larger life-process; in other words, is largely a social product. Hence, as we have already said, a scientific basis for philosophical individualism does not exist. This does not mean, however, that the individual's mental life is wholly submerged in that of his group. Biological variation alone would prevent this. The active character of the individual mind also militates against this view. Consequently, we must avoid the error of the complete social determinism of individual consciousness and of individual behavior. So far as science can discover, there is no such determinism. The individual develops variations of his own both physically and mentally. If this were not so, progress would be impossible in human society, except through the action of natural selection upon groups. But the facts seem to show that most changes in human society start with the variations, originalities, and inventions of the individual. While these are socially conditioned, they are also conditioned by the nature of the individual. As we have seen, if they are found socially useful, they may be taken up by the group, diffused by means of suggestion, imitation, and communication, and hence learned by all the members of the group. Thus the individual is a factor in the group life and may change the culture and the behavior of his group.

Individual determinism is, however, as impossible as social determinism in any scientific explanation of human behavior. Since individuals form a mutual environment for each other, the form of their association, their group organization, and their culture are quite as influential in determining behavior as in

2 We would, however, agree with Bartlett (Psychology and Primitive Culture, p. 11) that "the attempt to find the beginning of social customs and institutions in purely individual experience is essentially a mistaken one." The reality, as Bartlett points out, is never the individual Dure and simple, but always "The individual-in-a-given-social-group.”