Social Psychology, An Outline And Source Book

( Originally Published 1909 )

By Edward Alsworth Ross. London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd.

This book is described by its author as "the pioneer treatise, in any language, professing to deal systematically with the subject of social psychology." It is the first text-book written for students by a teacher of the science indicated by the chapter headings: "Suggestibility," "The Crowd," "Mob Mind," "Conventionality," "Custom," "Compromise," "Public Opinion," and the like, and as an introduction it has several merits. It is easy reading, fresh, vigorous and provocative. Every chapter is crammed with illustrations from the most varied sources, and ends with a collection of delightful "exercises." We quote at random, "Does the science of history foster the conservative spirit?" "Compare the big university with the small college in power to fo in and refine the student," and "Trace in detail the route by which a Parisian style reaches your neighbors." The illustrations look sometimes as if they had hardly been sufficiently sifted and tested; there is a suspicious-looking statement in the footnote to page 217, and the author quotes sometimes from second-rate or fifth rate writers without making his own estimate of the matter sufficiently distinct; instance pages 162-3, 177-8, 306. But in the present state of the science, and for the purpose of an introduction, the 'number and variety of his selections is a fault on the right side.

Professor Ross asks for criticism and his book is good enough to deserve it. Two points in particular strike the reader. The first is the imperative need of better arrangement. The con-tents of the chapters not only overlap but are inextricably entangled with one another, whilst the summaries and marginal headings of the same chapters often emphasize the looseness of the internal cohesion of each. Yet of course difficulties of arrangement are the chief difficulties of the science as a whole, and the present writer, after a good deal of thought, is quite unable to suggest any definite plan by which improvement could be made. The second point is the general impression which the book leaves, of too close an approach to a "thin rationalism." Every here and there we find statements which tend the other way, but they are not numerous or emphatic enough to balance the rest. One significant phrase is found on page 296: "After a mind has been purged from all regard for prestige, imitation proceeds on a rational basis." Another is on page 197: "Imitation marks the outcome of a spirited struggle" between parent and child. Custom "cakes round" and confines us: "a religious ferment emancipates souls, but out of it dogmas soon crystallize and close in upon the mind." Are these metaphors equal in all-round truth to the older one of the skeleton which the living body forms within itself? The last three pages of the book are in this aspect the worst, and they are very bad. What one desires throughout is a more constant recognition of the value of custom and convention in forcing every individual to begin at something near the full height of his race; of "heterogeny of ends;" of the complexity of human motives, and the finer motives and love of finer things growing up behind the shield of behavior enforced by other means. Above all, we desire more emphasis on the nature of individual freedom, as it is found in the man who has entered into the whole of the spiritual heritage which his world has to give, who possesses it because he is possessed by it and can now grow in it and beyond it. The lack of such constant recognition and such emphasis is the chief fault in the book.

HELEN WODEHOUSE.

University of Birmingham.