Social organization : $b A study of the larger mindCooley, Charles Horton
Science
Social organization : $b A study of the larger mind
Cooley, Charles Horton
Social psychology; Sociology
Mind is an organic whole made up of coöperating individualities, in
somewhat the same way that the music of an orchestra is made up of
divergent but related sounds. No one would think it necessary or
reasonable to divide the music into two kinds, that made by the whole
and that of particular instruments, and no more are there two kinds of
mind, the social mind and the individual mind. When we study the social
mind we merely fix our attention on larger aspects and relations rather
than on the narrower ones of ordinary psychology.
The view that all mind acts together in a vital whole from which the
individual is never really separate flows naturally from our growing
knowledge of heredity and suggestion, which makes it increasingly clear
that every thought we have is linked with the thought of our ancestors
and associates, and through them with that of society at large. It is
also the only view consistent with the general standpoint of modern
science, which admits nothing isolate in nature.
The unity of the social mind consists not in agreement but in
organization, in the fact of reciprocal influence or causation among
its parts, by virtue of which everything that takes place in it is
connected with everything else, and so is an outcome of the whole.
Whether, like the orchestra, it gives forth harmony may be a matter of
dispute, but that its sound, pleasing or otherwise, is the expression
of a vital coöperation, cannot well be denied. Certainly everything
that I say or think is influenced by what others have said or thought,
and, in one way or another, sends out an influence of its own in turn.
This differentiated unity of mental or social life, present in the
simplest intercourse but capable of infinite growth and adaptation, is
what I mean in this work by social organization. It would be useless, I
think, to attempt a more elaborate definition. We have only to open our
eyes to _see_ organization; and if we cannot do that no definition will
help us.
In the social mind we may distinguish—very roughly of course—conscious
and unconscious relations, the unconscious being those of which we are
not aware, which for some reason escape our notice. A great part of
the influences at work upon us are of this character: our language,
our mechanical arts, our government and other institutions, we derive
chiefly from people to whom we are but indirectly and unconsciously
related. The larger movements of society—the progress and decadence
of nations, institutions and races—have seldom been a matter of
consciousness until they were past. And although the growth of social
consciousness is perhaps the greatest fact of history, it has still but
a narrow and fallible grasp of human life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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