The Group Mind: A Sketch of the Principles of Collective Psychology: With Some Attempt to Apply Them to the Interpretation of National Life and Character — John Shaqi
The Group Mind: A Sketch of the Principles of Collective Psychology: With Some Attempt to Apply Them to the Interpretation of National Life and CharacterMcDougall, William
Science
The Group Mind: A Sketch of the Principles of Collective Psychology: With Some Attempt to Apply Them to the Interpretation of National Life and Character
McDougall, William
Ethnopsychology; National characteristics; Social psychology
But I will cite an eloquent passage from a recent work on sociology in
support of my view. “The bonds of society are in the members of society,
and not outside them. It is the memories, traditions, and beliefs of
each which make up the social memories, traditions and beliefs. Society
like the kingdom of God is within us. Within us, within each of us, and
yet greater than the thoughts and understandings of any of us. For the
social thoughts and feelings and willings of each, the socialised mind
of each, with the complex scheme of his relation to the social world, is
no mere reproduction of the social thoughts and feelings and willings of
the rest. Unity and difference here too weave their eternal web, the
greater social scheme which none of us who are part of it can ever see
in its entirety, but whose infinite subtlety and harmony we may more and
more comprehend and admire. As a community grows in civilisation and
culture, its traditions are no longer clear and definite ways of
thinking, its usages are no longer uniform, its spirit is no longer to
be summed up in a few phrases. But the spirit and tradition of a people
become no less real in becoming more complex. Each member no longer
embodies the whole tradition, but it is because each embodies some part
of a greater tradition to which the freely-working individuality of each
contributes. In this sense the spirit of a people, though existing only
in the individual members, more and more surpasses the measure of any
individual mind. Again, the social tradition is expressed through
institutions and records more permanent than the short-lived members of
community. These institutions and records are as it were stored social
values (just as, in particular, books may be called stored social
knowledge), _in themselves nothing_, no part of the social mind, but the
instruments of the communication of traditions from member to member, as
also from the dead past to the living present. In this way too, with
the increase of these stored values, of which members realise parts but
none the whole, the spirit of a people more and more surpasses the
measure of any individual mind. It is these social forces within and
without, working in the minds of individuals whose own social
inheritance is an essential part of their individuality, stored in the
institutions which they maintain from the past or establish in the
present, that mould the communal spirit of the successive generations.
In this sense too a community may be called greater than its members who
exist at any one time, since the community itself marches out of the
past into the present, and its members at any time are part of a great
succession, themselves first moulded by communal forces before they
become, so moulded, the active determinants of its future moulding.” An
admirable statement! “The greater social scheme which none of us can see
in its entirety”—“the spirit of a people” which “more and more surpasses
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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