100 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
the social whole, just as individual psychology is an expression of the need of understanding the subjective nature of the indi- vidual.
If the above positions are correct, it is evident that the only social psychology which is possible is a psychology of the activi- ties and development of the social group, a " functional psy- chology of the collective mind," as we shall see later that it may be termed. The genesis of the social feelings in the indi- vidual cannot possibly be made the subject-matter of social psychology, as some recent writers have attempted to do,' if it be once admitted that individual psychology has the right to exploit the whole universe in order to explain the psychical nature of the individual. Nor can the psychology of the behavior of an individual in the presence of another of its own species be called social psychology, for the same reason. Both of these important fields of research, belonging as they do to individual psychology, must be carefully distinguished from social or group psychology, if the latter is not to be involved in unnecessary confusion with the former. Nevertheless, in these two provinces of investigation individual psychology approaches closely to the proper territory of social psychology, and there can be little profit in trying to set up a hard and fast boundary between them, since the one science is necessarily dependent upon the other for completeness of view.
While social psychology may be thus comparatively easily
■ See especially an article on " Social Psychology and Sociology," by Gustavo TosTi, in the Psychological Review for July, 1898. Dr. Tosti seems to recognize the weakness of his position, for he says: ".'>ocial psychology is to be conceived as a mere name for a chapter of [individual] genetic psychology." It could not, indeed, be otherwise; for a science studying the rise and growth of the "social state of mind" could not be isolated from general genetic psychology. What we have called " social psychology," however — viz., the law of the phenomena dependent upon the inter- action of individual minds — Dr. Tosti calls "sociology." He even goes so far as to speak of the work of Lazarus and Steinthal as distinctively sociological rather than psychological. The quarrel can be, therefore, only one about names ; for Dr. Tosti evidently means by "sociology" exactly what we mean by "social psychology." But with a recent writer in this Journal (Vol. IV, p. 67 1 , note) we would like to suggest, a propos of such attempts to confine sociology to the consideration of purely psycho- logical phenomena, that biological sociology " may one day wreak a poetic vengeance upon those who are so fond of proclaiming its defunct condition."
