Social Value: A Study in Economic Theory, Critical and ConstructiveAnderson, Benjamin M. (Benjamin McAlester)
General
Social Value: A Study in Economic Theory, Critical and Constructive
Anderson, Benjamin M. (Benjamin McAlester)
Value
anger are unsocial and individualistic. Some writers have treated
intelligence as an individualistic faculty, and have founded sociality on
some form of sentiment. This is well enough if we use social in the second
sense of pertaining to immediate conversation, or fellow feeling. But that
these sociable emotions are essentially higher, or pertain peculiarly to
collective life, is very doubtful. Cooley holds that no such division of
human nature is possible. Social or moral progress consists less in the
aggrandizement of certain faculties and suppression of others, than in the
discipline of all with reference to a progressive organization of life.
The rest of the book is devoted to a study of society in its distributive
aspect, or as we should say ordinarily, using the terms which Professor
Cooley objects to, the study of the social nature of individuals. It is
based in large measure upon a study of the development of children.
Personality is an essentially social thing. The "I" feeling is a thing
which only social influences can develop.[109] The thought process within
the "individual mind" is a social process,--we think in words, and, indeed,
in conversations.[110] I shall not develop these notions at length. They
are of similar nature to those in Professor Baldwin's _Social and Ethical
Interpretations_, when he discusses the "dialectic of personal growth."
They are interesting and pertinent as showing in a concrete way the
tremendous and comprehensive sweep of social factors in the creation of the
individual mind.
_Social Organization_, which appeared in 1909, takes up the collective
aspect of human-mental life.
Mind is an organic whole, made up of cooperating
individualities, in somewhat the same way that the
music of an orchestra is made up of divergent but
related sounds.[111] No one would think it necessary or
reasonable to divide the music into two kinds, that
made by the whole, and that of the particular
instruments, and no more are there two kinds of mind,
the social mind and the individual mind. The view that
all mind acts together in a vital whole from which that
of 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.
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