ABSTRACT
There are affinities in thought that are not directly traceable to "influences", personal contacts, and the like. Of such a nature are the affinities of some aspects of Ferdinand Toennies's thought to phenomenology and symbolic interactionism. Toennies's concepts of "essential will" and "arbitrary will", as Albert Salomon has observed, are not so much psychological but phenomenological in character, if psychology is considered as a positive science, like physics, dealing with a world of objects, and phenomenology as a philosophical discipline, dealing with fundamental problems of knowledge and experience. Toennies reviewed favorably, but without enthusiasm, James Mark Baldwin's Social and Ethical Interpretation in Mental Development. He comments on Baldwin's quotation of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft that the author's consideration of reciprocal effects between individual and social phenomena did not strike him as being a novel observation. The most striking affinity between Toennies and George Herbert Mead occurs with regard to affirmative and negative human relations.
