CONCEPTS AND METHODS OF SOCIOLOGY 167
based on psychological characteristics. The fundamental divi- sion now is into instinctive and rational societies. The bands, swarms, flocks, and herds in which animals live and co-operate, are held together by instinct and not by rational comprehension of the utility of association. Their like-response to stimulus, their imitative acts, the frequent appearance among them of impression and submission, are all purely instinctive phenomena. Not so are the social relations of human beings. There is no human community in which instinctive like-response to stimula- tion is not complicated by some degree of rational comprehension of the utility of association.
The combinations, however, of instinct and reason are of many gradations; and the particular combination found in any given community determines its modes of like-response to stimu- lus and its consciousness of kind establishes for it a dominant mode of the relation of mind to mind, or, as Tarde would have phrased it, of inter-mental activity. This dominant mode of inter-mental activity inclusive of like-response and the con- sciousness of kind is the chief social bond of the given community, and it affords the best distinguishing mark for a classification of any society on psychological grounds. So dis- criminated, the kinds of rational or human societies are eight, as follows:
1. There is a homogeneous community of blood-relatives, composed of individuals that from infancy have been exposed to a common environment and to like circumstances, and who, therefore, by heredity and experience are alike. Always conscious of themselves as kindred, their chief social bond is sympathy. The kind or type of society, therefore, that is represented by a group of kindred may be called the Sympathetic.
2. There is a community made up of like spirits, gathered perhaps from widely distant points, and perhaps originally strangers, but drawn together by their common response to a belief or dogma, or to an opportunity for pleasure or improve- ment. Such is the religious colony, like the " Mayflower " band, or the Latter-Day Saints; such is the partisan political colony, like the Missouri and the New England settlements in Kansas;
