ABSTRACT
The ‘human faculty,’ suggestive in its portentous powers of a miraculous origin, rests upon a very definite fact—the symbolism of the word. The transmission of human cognition can only take place by the operation of the social aggregate. The soul of man, in so far as it is human at all, is a social product. Precisely the same thing takes place in the social transmission of the human mind. The intrinsic constitution of man is made the scapegoat for the psychological effects of the constitution of the social organism. That human consciousness enters his being mainly by means of words, which carry with them all the developments, and all the diseases, anomalies, and falsifications of human word-thought. A new psychological fixation, similar in its result, though different in its operation, from that produced by instinct in insects, is brought about by the social transmission of ‘custom,’ ‘tradition,’ ‘authority,’ and their falsification in the interests of power.
