The rest of the book is devoted to a study of society in its distributive aspect, or as we should say ordinarily, using the terms which Professor Cooley objects to, the study of the social nature of individuals. It is based in large measure upon a study of the development of children. Personality is an essentially social thing. The "I" feeling is a thing which only social influences can develop.[109] The thought process within the "individual mind" is a social process,--we think in words, and, indeed, in conversations.[110] I shall not develop these notions at length. They are of similar nature to those in Professor Baldwin's _Social and Ethical Interpretations_, when he discusses the "dialectic of personal growth." They are interesting and pertinent as showing in a concrete way the tremendous and comprehensive sweep of social factors in the creation of the individual mind.
_Social Organization_, which appeared in 1909, takes up the collective aspect of human-mental life.
Mind is an organic whole, made up of coöperating individualities, in somewhat the same way that the music of an orchestra is made up of divergent but related sounds.[111] No one would think it necessary or reasonable to divide the music into two kinds, that made by the whole, and that of the particular instruments, and no more are there two kinds of mind, the social mind and the individual mind. The view that all mind acts together in a vital whole from which that of the individual is never really separate, flows naturally from our growing knowledge of heredity and suggestion, which makes it increasingly clear that every thought we have is linked with the thought of our ancestors and associates, and through them with that of society at large. It is also the only view consistent with the general standpoint of modern science, which admits nothing isolate in nature.
The unity of the social mind consists not in agreement but in organization, in the fact of reciprocal influence or causation among its parts, by virtue of which everything that takes place in it is connected with everything else, and so is an outcome of the whole. Whether, like the orchestra, it gives forth harmony may be a matter of dispute, but that its sound, pleasing or otherwise, is the expression of a vital coöperation, cannot well be denied.[112]