Page:Philosophical Review Volume 9.djvu/671

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REVIEWS OF BOOKS.
[Vol. IX.

and are therefore able to work together for common ends" (p. 51). In the chapter entitled "The Psychology of Society," criticisms are made upon Professor Baldwin's conceptions that "the matter of social organizations consists of thoughts; by which is meant all sorts of intellectual states, such as imaginations, knowledges, and informations," and that the form or method of social organization consists "in the interaction of the individual as a particularizing force and society as a generalizing force." Professor Giddings maintains that "the substance of society at first is sympathy and instinct mainly. At its best estate, society may rise to a level where thought has for the moment completely subordinated feeling. But usually, and throughout the greater part of its career, society is sympathy and instinct more or less organized, more or less directed, more or less controlled, by thought " (p. 39). Against Professor Baldwin's view of the method of social organization, the author urges that the thought of self is not so largely a product of the social relation as Professor Baldwin represents. "The sociologist, then, must continue to think of the individual as being both an ego and a socius, and yet as being at all times more ego than socius" (pp. 3334). "It seems probable, then, that in 'the dialectic of personal growth,' the original ego with which the dialectic starts, plays throughout a controlling part; and that, after all, the process of developing a socius is one which essentially consists in modifying, by means of social relations and activities, an originally independent self" (p. 34). And this development of the socius is accomplished by the mediation of a perception of resemblance working upon the material of social sympathy.

In the paper on "The Ethical Motive," the distinction between the ethical and the economic motive is discussed, and the result obtained is stated as follows: "In more technical terms, then, the economic motive is the sum of those normal desires to which, at any given moment, we are giving a preferential attention. The ethical motive is the sum of those normal desires which, at the same given moment, we are denying attention or forcing out of consciousness by neglect, but which will presently assert themselves strongly enough to divert attention" (p. 20). Whether the economist would accept such a statement of the economic motive I shall leave to the economist to say. At any rate, the ethical motive cannot be the sum of those normal desires to which we are denying attention. The only reason I shall give for such point-blank rejection of Professor Giddings's definition is the first reason Professor Giddings gives in confirmation of his definition, namely, the possible merging of the eco-