[111] This analogy is unhappy, if pushed very far--like most analogies between physics and psychics. It serves as a useful figure of speech, however,--which is all Professor Cooley designs it for. [112] _Social Organization_, pp. 3-4. [113] _Social Organization_, pp. 6-9. [114] _Ibid._, p. 9. [115] Compare Professor Giddings' more detailed and concrete treatment of the subject in his _Readings in Descriptive and Historical Sociology_, New York, 1906, pp. 124-428. [116] Professor C. A. Elwood, in the essay mentioned _supra_, _Some Prolegomena to Social Psychology_, is the first, so far as I know, to apply Professor Dewey's psychological viewpoint to the study of the social mind. Chap. II of his book contains a very excellent brief discussion of this point. Without going into the matter at length, it must suffice to say here that the new viewpoint stresses the significance of mental processes for _activity_, for the adjustment of the organism to its environment, rather than the _structure_ or _content_ of the mental process. It stresses impulse, instinct, habit, etc., and refuses to undertake a synthetic process, which strives to get some sort of mechanical unity by combining abstract, structural elements. The unifying principle in mind is _activity_, _function_. Professor Elwood holds that, while the individual mind has unity both of structure and of function, the social mind has a unity of function only. I think the contrast is not so sharp as that. There is _some_ structural unity in the social mind, there are points of identity among individual minds, common ideals, and a common--even though small--body of knowledge, especially in very elementary matters. And the unity of the individual mind is primarily a unity of _function_. Certainly--and there is no issue with Professor Elwood here!--there is no unifying "soul-substance" lying back of the psychic activities organized in the single individual mind. And the analogy between the mind of an individual and the mind of society is not intended to read into the social mind any of the hypothetical character which an absolutistic, preevolutionary metaphysics ascribed to the individual mind, but rather--in so far as the issue is raised at all--to divest the individual mind of just that hypothetical character. _Cf._ Friedrich Paulsen's _Introduction to Philosophy_, on "soul-substance," and Wundt's _Voelker-Psychologie_, vol. I, chap. I. [117] Davenport, _op. cit._, pp. 467-68. [118] _Op. cit._, pp. 445-46. (The reference is given to Professor Davenport's book for the convenience of the reader. The original article appears in the _Journal of Political Economy_ for March, 1906.) "Some linguistic uses connected with collective nouns will offer a point of departure. When thought of merely as indicating an aggregate, a unit, the collective noun takes a singular verb; if regarded as a collection of units, it takes the plural verb....