THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIOLOGY 153
and society as the only reality. 29 On the other hand, it might be fairly asserted that the thoroughgoing individualists of the Eng- lish school saw only persons, and thought of society itself as the abstraction. With Comte the family, not the individual, was the unit of the social organism. Spencer, in spite of occasional aberrations in favor of the family, represented the individual as corresponding to the cell in the animal body. Spencer's political views made him adhere to a conventional individualism not always congruous with the biological analogy. His influence told, therefore, in favor of the older idea of the individual as a reflecting, calculating unit, consciously co-operating in society for his own ends, and nicely weighing his own interests against those of his fellows. All the political philosophy of Rousseau, mediated through the French Revolution, chimed with this theory of the individual. Oddly enough, the "great-man" doctrine of Carlyle aroused Spencer to the defense of his biological conception of social evolution. In demonstrating the continuity of this process and vindicating the uniformity of causation, Spencer was obliged to explain the " great man " as a product of his age and social group a theory which did not always jump with the implica- tions of his political creed. Before this discussion was dropped, William James, 30 Fiske, 31 and Grant Allen 32 had been drawn into the lists. The latter in his Psychology dealt with the " social self" in a suggestive and enlightening way. 33 This was the first of a series of studies by various scholars which have radically modified the concepts of the individual and of personality. The same problem was also partially involved in the attempt of Mac- kenzie to abstract the organic idea from the biological sociology. 34 One of the elements of this organic idea is " an intrinsic relation between the part arid the whole," *'. e., the person and society.
" EARTH, loc. cit., p. 55.
"JAMES, "Great Men, Great Thoughts and the Environment," Atlantic Monthly, October, 1880.
11 FISKE, " Sociology and Hero Worship," ibid., January, 1881.
"ALLEN, "The Genesis of Genius," ibid., March, 1881.
"JAMES, Psychology (New York, 1890), Vol. I, pp. 291-95.
- MACKENZIE, Introduction to Social Philosophy (New York, 1890), pp. 127-82.
