This does not exclude the possibility that other motives, also, especially those of practical utility, have given rise to what were at first individual habits, but gradually. spread throughout a community and thus became laws of custom. The predominant feature of this development, however, is the fact that primitive customs, even when they incidentally serve practical needs, as, for example, the custom of wearing a uniform pattern of clothes, of having meals at a regular time etc., still depend more or less on particular mythological ideas. In fact, it would be hard to think of it as otherwise at a time when consciousness was under the complete control of a myth-making apperception.
12. With customs, as with language, the change in meaning has exercised a modifying influence on their development. As a result of this change, two chief kinds of transformation have taken place. In the first, the original mythical motive has been lost and no new one has taken its place. The custom continues as a consequence of associative habit, but loses its imperative character and becomes much weaker in its outward manifestations.
In the second class of transformations of a moral-social purpose takes the place of the original mytho-religious motive. The two kinds of change may in any single case be most intimately united; and even [p. 308] when a custom does not serve any particular social end directly, as is the case, for example, with certain rules of deportment, of etiquette, on the manner of dressing, eating, etc., still it may do so indirectly in that the existence of some common rules for the members of a community is favorable to their united life and therefore to their common mental development.
13. The psychological changes in customs as pointed out, constitute the preparation for their differentiation into three spheres, namely those of custom of law, and of morality. The last two are to be regarded as special forms of custom aiming at moral-social ends. The detailed investigation of the psychological development and differentiation of customs in general is, however, a problem of social psychology, and the discussion of the rise of law and morality belong also to general history and ethics.
14. We have here, in mental communities, and especially in their development of language, myths, and customs, mental interconnections and interactions that differ in essential respects from the interconnection of the psychical compounds in an individual consciousness, but still have just as much reality as the individual consciousness itself. In this sense we may speak of the interconnection of the ideas and feelings of a social community as a collective consciousness, and of the common volitional tendencies as a collective will. In doing this we are not to forget that these concepts do not mean something that exists apart from the conscious and volitional processes of the individual, any more than the community itself is something besides the union of individuals. Since this union, however, brings forth certain mental products, such as language, myths, and customs, for which only the germs are present in the individual, and since it determines the development of the individual from a very early [p. 309] period, it is just as much an object of psychology as the individual consciousness. For psychology must give an account of the interactions which give rise to the products and attributes of collective consciousness and of the collective will.
14a. The facts arising from the existence of mental communities have only recently come within the pale of psychological investigation. These problems were formerly referred either to the special mental sciences (philology, history, jurisprudence, etc.) or, if of a more general character, to philosophy, that is to metaphysics. If psychology did touch upon them at all, it was dominated, as were the special sciences, history, jurisprudence, etc., by the reflective method of popular psychology, which tends to treat all mental products of communities, to as great an extent as possible, as voluntary inventions aimed from the first at certain utilitarian ends. This view found its chief philosophical expression in the doctrine of a social contract, according to which a mental community is riot something original and natural, but is derived from the voluntary union of a number of individuals. This position is psychologically untenable, and completely helpless in the presence of the problems of social psychology. As one of its after-effects we have even to-day the grossest misunderstandings of the concepts collective consciousness and collective will. Instead of regarding them simply as expressions for the actual agreement and interaction of individuals in a community, some still suspect that there is behind them a mythological being of some kind, or at least a metaphysical substance.