It will then be necessary to posit group consciousness as we posit individual consciousness, not distributively but collectively. We have group mind and group will when the group acts as one or behaves as one; but we have group consciousness when the group thinks as one. Not that this action can possibly take place outside of the individual minds; MacDougall is undoubtedly right in his citation of E. Barker: [30]“There is no group mind existing apart from the minds of the members of the group; the group mind exists only in the minds of its members. But nevertheless it exists.” Yet the group mind must include the individual minds in a unified purpose, to which they relinquish their own wills, willingly or with a struggle, whose ideas are their ideas, whose consciousness is, to a certain extent at least, their consciousness. If it is possible, in ordinary speech, to recognize that a man acts now personally, again as a churchman, a citizen, or a committee member, it should be possible to accept this fact as a part of our theory and to embody it as one phase of the theory itself. The individual and the group are not mutually exclusive; neither exists without the other; the group is a part of the individual mind as much as the individual is a part of the group mind. CHAPTER II. GROUPS IN CONTACT 1. Theoretically, the individual might be independent of other individuals and of groups as well. He might be his own alter, so that through the active and reflective standpoints working on each other the individual himself might constitute a group mind, and might produce many, if not all, the characteristic products of the group.[31] But practically in society, the exact opposite is invariably the case. According to Baldwin’s dialectic of the individual development: [32]“The sense of self always involves a sense of the other.” [33]“The real self is always the bipolar self, the social self.” Empirically, not only are civilization, history and government the products of social heredity; the individual himself as we have him owes his mental content, many of his feeling and motor responses, and his ultimate ideals, to the group in which he was born and has developed. On this basis the ancient conflict between the isolated individual and the group domination becomes unimportant, if not meaningless from the empirical point of view. As Joseph K. Hart remarks: [34]Membership in the group establishes in the members a set of habits which are the personal counterpart of the customs of the group; the group is not outside and around him; it is inside him; what is custom in the group has become habit in him.