THE RELATION OF PERSONAL TO CULTURAL IDEAS.
i. Social Logic versus Solipsism.
PSYCHOLOGY has to do with group consciousness as well as with individual consciousness. Nevertheless, it is the analysis of the typical individual mind, rendered possible through retro-introspection coupled with the assumption that one's own mind may be taken as typical, which gives us our psychological data. With logic the case is different. It is true that terms, propositions, and logical inferences must appear in personal consciousness in order to be understood; but the awareness that they come originally from without and through the agency of fellow human beings (mostly, as a rule, our fellow-countrymen) is inseparable from the ability to understand and employ them. Moreover, some half of the terms in common use refer to objects and modes of being or action which are not human individuals or groups and not human attributes, mental or physical, yet which are known to be what they are known to be through the universal agreement of educated human minds. It is agreed to signify particular historical places and things by the same proper or singular names; specific and generic types (of material, individual, differentiated part, or group) by the same concrete-general names; processes, qualities, and relations, by the same abstract names. This consensus of logical usage implies at once the presence of similar ideas in different minds, and the reality of objects and modes which are not within any of those minds, but equally before all of them. Thus elementary logic is the proper corrective to metaphysical solipsism, and that makes it the proper introduction to sociology. For the standpoint of sociology is antithetical to that of solipsism. Sociology not only asserts the reality of the social group as something superadded to the reality of its individuals taken distributively; but its most particular data are relations between individuals under social conditions. Through such relations each individual acquires a
