The Principles of Sociology: An Analysis of the Phenomena of Association and of Social Organization (Classic Reprint)

The time has not come for an exhaustive treatise on sociology. Nevertheless the scientific description of society is well advanced, and there is no reason why it should remain inarticulate. There are principles of sociology, and they admit of logical organization. The present work is an attempt to combine the principles of sociology in a coherent theory. Believing that sociology is a psychological science, and that the description of society in biological terms is a mistake, I have endeavoured to direct attention chiefly to the psychic aspects of social phenomena. Association and social organization I have attempted to explain as consequences of a particular mental state; namely, the consciousness of kind, which is defined on page 17 as a state of consciousness in which any being, whether low or high in the scale of life, recognizes another conscious being as of like kind with itself. The consciousness of kind marks off the animate from the inanimate. Within the wide class of the animate it marks off species and races ;within the race it marks off ethnical and political groups, and social classes: it is therefore the psychological ground of social groupings and distinctions.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

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