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
refused to worship a supposed individual liberty which was proving
destructive of the real liberty of the vast majority, and preferred to
emphasise the moral well-being and betterment of the whole community,
and to conceive of each of its members as attaining his own well-being
and betterment in and through the community. Herein lay, or seemed to
lie, a revolution of ideas. Instead of starting from a central
individual, to whom the social system is supposed to be adjusted, the
idealist starts from a central social system, in which the individual
must find his appointed orbit of duty. But after all the revolution is
only a restoration; and what is restored is simply the _Republic_ of
Plato[11].” The same writer reminds us that “both Plato and Hegel thus
imply the idea of a moral organism”; and he adds, “It is this conception
of a moral organism which Bradley urges. It is implied in daily
experience, and it is the only explanation of that experience. ‘In fact,
what we call an individual man is what he is because of and by virtue of
community, and communities are not mere names, but something real.’
Already at birth the child is what he is in virtue of communities: he
has something of the family character, something of the national
character, something of the civilised character which comes from human
society. As he grows, the community in which he lives pours itself into
his being in the language he learns and the social atmosphere he
breathes, so that the content of his being implies in its every fibre
relations of community. He is what he is by including in his essence the
relations of the social State.... And regarding the State as a system,
in which many spheres (the family, for instance) are subordinated to one
sphere, and all the particular actions of individuals are subordinated
to their various spheres, we may call it a moral organism, a systematic
whole informed by a common purpose or function. As such it has an outer
side—a body of institutions; it has an inner side—a soul or spirit which
sustains that body. And since it is a moral organism—since, that is to
say, its parts are themselves conscious moral agents—that spirit resides
in those parts and lives in their consciousness. In such an organism—and
this is where it differs from an animal organism, and why we have to use
the word moral—the parts are conscious: they know themselves in their
position as parts of the whole, and they therefore know the whole of
which they are parts. So far as they have such knowledge, and a will
based upon it, so far is the moral organism self-conscious and
self-willing.... Thus, on the one hand, we must recognise that the State
lives; that there is a nation’s soul, self-conscious in its citizens;
and that to each citizen this living soul assigns his field of
accomplishment[12].” On a later page of the same book we read—“All the
institutions of a country, so far as they are effective, are not only
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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