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
the measure of any individual mind”—“the communal spirit of the
successive generations”—“the community” which is “greater than its
members who exist at any one time”; all these are alternative
designations of that organised system of mental forces which exists over
and above, though not independently of, the individuals in each of whom
some fragment of it is embodied and which is the group mind. And the
writer of this statement is Mr R. M. Maciver; the passage occurs in the
section of his book designed to “clear out of the way this misleading
doctrine of super-individual minds.” In the same section he goes on to
say that “every association, every organised group, may and does have
rights and obligations which are not the rights and obligations of any
or all of its members taken distributively but only of the association
acting as an organised unity.... As a unity the association may become a
‘juristic person,’ a ‘corporation,’ and from the legal standpoint the
character of unity so conceived is very important.... The ‘juristic
person’ is a real _unity_, and therefore more than a _persona ficta_,
but the reality it possesses is of a totally different order of being
from that of the persons who establish it.” But, perversely as it seems
to me, Maciver adds “the unity of which we are thinking is not mechanic
or organic or even psychic.” I cannot but think that, in thus denying
the organic and psychic nature of this unity, Maciver is under the
influence of that unfortunate and still prevalent way of thinking of the
psychic as identical with the conscious which has given endless trouble
in psychology; because it has prompted the hopeless attempt, constantly
renewed, to describe the structure and organisation of the mind in
terms of conscious stuff, ignoring the all-important distinction between
mental activity, which is sometimes, though perhaps not always,
consciousness, and mental structure which is not. The structure and
organisation of the spirit of the community is in every respect as
purely mental or psychic as is the structure and organisation of the
individual mind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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