Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III Social Unity: Interpretations. Whenever social acts are explained in terms of the: mental qualities possessed by the members of a group, / we have, at least empirically, a psychological interpretation of society. The popular truism, holding that the organization of society must not go against human nature, expresses negatively the necessity of correspondence between individual minds and the social state. The truth that certain positive correspondences must exist is less easy of application. An empirical psychology is daily illustrated in the newspapers. The doings of a belligerent nation are explained in terms of its
national spirit;
those of a board of directors by the supposed nature of some of its members. In the Wealth of Nations Adam Smith exemplifies a like method when he bases the phenomena of exchange on man’s
trucking disposition; and he does the same thing in a more scientific way in his Theory of the Moral Sentiments, wherein our sense of moral fitness, or
propriety, is traced to mental traits summed up under the term
sympathy. It would be possible to illustrate such social interpretations from works in all special sciences of society: and it would be exceedingly interesting to trace among them the increased emphasis and systematization of this 34 [180 psychological aspect. The historian of Ethnology could turn back to Pritchard, in the early part of the nineteenth century, who used evidence of the psychological similarity of different peoples to prove the racial unity of mankind. He could point to Wundt or Schueltze of our own day, and doubtless show a continuity of development between the two periods thus represented. A comparison of Max Miiller and Herman Paul suggests similar advance in philology. The treatment of economic t…