SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY Social psychology was the product of the Romantic Age which was initiated by Herder and completed by Hegel (d. 1831). There is nothing before this period which has power and continuity. It is true that Aristotle used the idea of a sense of kinship, that Hobbes made fear dominant in human relations and that Adam Smith partly evaded the individualism of the eighteenth century by a doctrine of sympathy as a primary instinctive response to the actions of other persons. But the justification of a social psychology was lacking so long as there was no conception of a total life in which the individual was merged by the very condi tions of his existence. This conception was provided by the his torical school which began at the close of the eighteenth century to challenge the individualism of that age. Herd( : created a new sense for the continuity of racial life and began the movement which was destined to become the science of anthropology. The development of this science was deeply affected by the Hegelian concept of universal mind and of culture as the manifestation of that mind. This interpretation, though wholly speculative in char acter, had the effect of concentrating attention on the psychic anthropology which the German philosophers first attempted to construct and they called their science by that name. But the defect of the method they employed was its lack of empirical investigation, and the consciousness of this defect led to different attempts at reconstruction. Auguste Comte's sociology was one of these attempts and, though it does not belong exclusively to the field of psychology, the idea of social forces which it estab lished must be noted as a significant contribution. In Germany at the same time Herbart was leading a reaction from idealism to realism and the Herbartians were responsible for the first attempt to translate the idea of the social mind into definite theories of a psychological type. The work of T. Waitz, Anthropologic der Naturvolker, belongs to this school (1859). In 1856 Moritz Lazarus published a work entitled Das Leben der Seele; Hermann Steinthal published Der Ursprung der Sprache in the same year. In 186o Lazarus and Steinthal founded the journal called Zeitung fiir V5lker-Psychologie and SPrach-Wissenschaft. This is usually regarded as the historical basis of modern social psychology. In England Comte's influence affected Herbert Spencer who empha sised the relation of psychology to sociology. G. H. Lewes, under the same influences, first defined psychology as including, over and above the functions of the organism, those interactions between individuals which constitute the social nature of man. A further
stimulus to the subject was given by the rise of evolutionary biology which gave the required definiteness to the earlier doc trines of progress and development. An original and striking attempt to indicate the positive evolution of the social mind was made by Walter Bagehot (Physics and Politics, 1873). Bagehot was fully conscious of the method which he proposed to use, namely "the applications of the principles of natural selection and inheritance to political society." In carrying out his programme he employed the language of dynamic psychology. The first age of man was called by him the custom-making age, a period in which the ruling force was imitation and of which the product was a "cake of custom." Next follows the period of conflict between customs, a period of disruption and mental agitation, which leads to "the age of discussion" and produces toleration and a respect for intellectual independence. Bagehot gives many acute examples of the spread of customs, as for example the adoption of a par ticular literary style by writers of a given period. Very little was left for later writers to do in this particular class of work.
Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904) achieved a great reputation for a theory which was in essence another statement of Bagehot's theme. Tarde's works, of which the best known is Les lois de l'Irnitation, were temporarily important. Time has shown that they were not sufficiently emancipated from the historical and sociological romanticism which Comte's ideas of social evolution made popular in France. A similar criticism can be applied to Taine who exploited the suggestive but misleading doctrine of the "milieu." Taine was influenced by the growth in France of psychopathology and the emphasis laid on suggestion. This influ ence was even stronger in the case of Gustave Le Bon who has popularized a rather uncritical doctrine of the Crowd and its mentality (La Psychologie des Foules, 1895). There is an ele ment of truth in Le Bon's chief contention that crowd-mentality is inferior to the mental level of the same individuals acting sepa rately: there is also undoubted truth in the view that emotional states are in some sense contagious : but Le Bon's method is too purely descriptive to be permanently valuable as psychology. The wide generalizations of Tarde and Le Bon have been in part responsible for a reaction toward a narrowly analytic view of social reactions.