ABSTRACT
Sociology is often said to be concerned with social as distinct from individual phenomena. "What a man does without having learned from the example of another person, walking, crying, eating, mating, is purely vital: while walking with a certain step, singing a song, preferring at table one's national dishes and partaking of them in a well-bred way, courting a woman after the manner of the time, are social." This passage from M. Tarde is quoted with much approbation by ProfesRor Ross, who adds:
This is all very unsatisfactory and very confusing. Nothing a man can be or do is entirely uninfluenced by "others," and all we can rightly distinguish is the immediacy or remoteness of certain influences. Society for every man is origin, atmosphere, environment, life. How can he think or be at all out of relation to society? Alike the expression of his organic needs and the expression of his inmost individuality take social forms. Why then should it be a social phenomenon to dread heresy and presumably not a social phenomenon to embrace heresy 1 Even were the heresy" anti-social," it would still not be non-social, since heresy no less than orthodoxy is a way of responding to social environment. Or again, if a man fears the dark, why should that be "merely psychic" (whatever that may be) 1 Has he not inherited the instinct from ancestors who knew good cause for fearing the terror by night 1 Strangest of all is the statement that sexual attraction is not a social phenomenon. If a man craves a mate, is a craving which iR itself the very foundation and beginning of all society, and owes its strength in each to an endless process of social selection, the less social because it is "vital" ?
