(iii.) The social whole, though implied in every mind, only has reality in the totality of minds in a given community considered as an identical working system. (i.) Society and the State and every institution present themselves to us at first sight as a number of persons, together, perhaps, with certain buildings and other external apparatus, and certain kinds of work carried on and tangible results produced--so many children “educated,” so many workmen “employed,” so many ships built or fields tilled. But if we could bring before ourselves the complete reality of any social group or institution, we should find ourselves considering a very different order of facts. Let us think for a moment of a rate-supported elementary school. We imagine it as a heap of buildings and a mass of children with a percentage of teachers scattered among {171} them. But in what does its actual working really consist, and on what does it depend? The actual reality of the school lies in the fact that certain living minds are connected in a certain way. Teachers, pupils, managers, parents, and the public must all of them have certain operative ideas, and must be guided according to these ideas in certain portions of their lives, if the school is to be a school. Now, the being guided by certain operative ideas is, in other words, the activity of certain appercipient masses dictating a certain point of view, in so far as those particular masses are awake. And it must be noted that the connection or identity in which the school exists presupposes a different activity, that is, a different appercipient system, in every mind, and more especially in every class of mind concerned. It is the same as in our old example of the screw and the nut. No school could be made of teachers alone or of pupils alone; nor, again, could a school be made with teachers who were all the same, or with pupils who were all the same.