Anti-Semitism in the United States : $b Its history and causesLevinger, Lee J. (Lee Joseph)
History
Anti-Semitism in the United States : $b Its history and causes
Levinger, Lee J. (Lee Joseph)
Antisemitism -- United States; Jews -- United States
On the other hand, so radical a behaviorist as E. C. Lindeman remarks,
[15]“The group is a plurality of individuals, but what the group does
is not plural but singular.” [16]“From the purely descriptive point of
view, the group becomes a new quality.” Dr. M. M. Davis puts it this
way: [17]“Millions of brain cells are co-ordinated to think as one
brain. Psychology tries to tell how. Millions of brains co-ordinate
themselves and function in many ways as one brain. The how of that
marvel is for sociology.” Giddings calls the group mind “the concert
of thought, emotion and will” of individual minds. Cooley says:
[18]“The unity of the social mind consists not in agreement but in
organization.” Ellwood phrases it somewhat differently:
[19]The only unity we have in society is a unity of process.
The individual consciousness is unified both structurally and
functionally.... There is a collective mental life, but no social
mind in the same sense in which there is an individual mind.
Dr. Baldwin sums up his view in the last sentences of the Social
and Ethical Interpretations:
[20]Society is the form of natural organization which ethical
personalities come into in their growth. Ethical personality is the
form of natural development which individuals grow into who live in
social relationships. The true analogy, then, is not that which likens
it to a physiological organism, but rather that which likens it to a
psychological organization.
And so, if this were primarily a historical study, I might go over many
similar and differing theories, which consider the group as a unity on
the mental plane, that is, in one sense or another, as a group mind.
The material is still being collected for this study, the essential
points of view still being defined, and such important factors as
instinct and intelligence are still being redefined with the rapid
progress of science today. As several of the terms cited above suggest,
the difference between the individual as a mind and the group of
individuals as a mind is always given and must always be given in terms
of structure. In the words of Lindeman:
[21]The individual may be viewed as an integration of functioning
organs, and the group merely an integration of functions.... There
can be nothing organic about society or a group; there can be only a
series of relations, the results of specific responses to specific
situations.
Not to cite more opinions on a point on which there seems general
agreement, we may take it for granted that the chief, perhaps the only
difference historically pointed out between the mind of one man and of
a group of men is that the man has a brain and a nervous system, while
the group has neither, but operates apparently through the brains and
nervous systems of its members. But in their functioning, in their
activities, the mind of the man and of the nation or other group are so
similar as to be almost indistinguishable.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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