Nor is even this the whole story. Nearly all our reactions to these things are molded upon customs or pre-existing man ways. From washing one's face in the morning to donning one's pajamas at night one does chiefly the things that are socially prescribed. This conformity of the individual to his group is a theme of satirist and of social psychologist alike. So shortsighted is the notion that the function of mind is simply adjustment to the physical environment.

But the notion of social adjustment also has its own kind of evasiveness. Social psychology shows that "myself" and "other-self" are not first given, and then adjusted, but that the two arise in consciousness as reciprocal aspects of one and the same experience.1 Therefore, in the adjustment that takes place between you and me, neither of us is a merely given environmental fact; neither is simply accommodated to the other, but both of us are in process of becoming persons, even in the act of social adjustment. Accordingly, that to which we adjust ourselves in our social functions has to be defined as an ideal toward which we co-operatively move. Stated thus generally, the principle may seem to be obscure, but see how simple it is in concrete cases. When I start a fire in my fireplace in order that my friend and I may enjoy an evening together, I do not adjust myself to the wood or to the fireplace-I adjust them to my friend and myself; nor does either of us merely accommodate himself to the other. Conversation is far different from this. It is, in fact, a method whereby we two

'This, which is now a commonplace, was brought to general recognition in this country largely by J. M. Baldwin's Social and Ethical Interpretations (New York, 1897).

mutually modify ourselves so as to be adjusted to a common ideal.

This partially answers our other question, What is it that secures adjustment through mental functioning? Psychology is cautious here. It wishes especially to avoid the unworkable notion of the soul as a thing-initself, apart from particular experiences. By fixing attention upon states of consciousness as such psychology was able for a time to postpone consideration of what it is that secures adjustment in the functions called mental. But the problem is forced upon us by the necessity of recognizing a difference between the concept "process" and the concept "function." Mental function implies such things as need, want, desire, purpose, ideal; and these lead away from states, thought of as merely compounded, toward the notion of self-realizing personality. The shyness of psychology toward any such notion as personality is not without justification, it is true. The only way to secure freedom from dogmatic and speculative entanglements has been to ignore certain troublesome problems. But surely we cannot absorb "process" into "function" and still retain process as mere change per se. Nor are we helped by speaking, as many are doing, of mental processes as functions of "the organism." Such terminology merely conceals or evades the problem. To substitute for "organism" the term "psycho-physical organism" or "mind-body" locates the problem, to be sure, but it does not face it. "Function" means that something in the end is better off. What is better off, and what is it to be better off?

I Ames, op. cit., p. 20.

If, on the other hand, we attempt to construe function from the standpoint of particular responses to particular stimuli,' we encounter some peculiar difficulties. In the first place, is our datum "stimulus and response" or "situation and response"? In many cases, at least, the objects that stimulate us get their specific stimulating quality from the interest of the moment. A loaded table is not the same thing to a starving man that it is to a sated one, nor is sudden immersion in water the same thing to an experienced swimmer that it is to one who has not learned to swim. If we attempt to get below such situations to mere stimuli, we think of each item thereof as stimulus of a particular sensation. Now, inasmuch as sensations are not concretely existing things but only aspects of a total experience, a stimulus of a sensation is itself only an aspect of a total situation. Our responses are made to situations rather than to stimuli. Further, since responses are functions, they have a predetermined tendency. There is no such thing as response in general, or strictly random responses. For example, learning by "trial and error," in animals and in man, involves as one primary factor the learner's "set" toward something. A mental reaction, then, at whatever level we take mind, is a response toward something as well as to something, and this "toward" reveals the nature of the reactor.

What, then, are we who are the termini of adjustment functions? By way of answer one is tempted to say,

I

P. II.

1 Cf. Irving King, The Development of Religion (New York, 1910),

E. L. Thorndike, Psychology of Learning (New York, 1913), pp. 13, 22, 26.

Why not ask the neighbors! We are mutually defining our wants and forming our purposes, and this is what defines us. A person is any reactor that approves or disapproves its own reactions, or that realizes consequences as successes or failures of its own. In the functions best known to us persons are adjusting themselves to the ideals or standards of personal-social life that they set before themselves, and to this end they are using—not adjusting themselves to whatever they regard as subpersonal.

The supposed obscurity of the notion of personal selves is not native to this concept-the obscurity has been imported into it by attempting to construe the more clear (our socially communicable desires and purposes) in terms of the less clear (animal life that lacks means of communication). Human functions are just what they seem to be from a fully achieved human point of view. Functional psychology, accordingly, should be, first and foremost, a psychology of personal selfrealizations. The functional psychology of religion must be this above all things else."

To think of human functions as merely complex cases of subhuman function, as King seems to do (op. cit., p. 39), endangers the functional point of view altogether. This may be seen in the tendency of this passage of King's to construe mental life in terms of combinations within a mechanically controlled system.

* Ames, who attempts to construe the functions of religion from a quasi-biological point of view, exhibits two quite natural consequences: (1) His notion of function, in spite of the general clarity of his exposition, contains a fundamental obscurity. "Adjustment" is his basal category, but just what is adjusted, and to what, does not distinctly appear. "The organism," it is said, "adjusts itself to its environment," but the adjustment "occurs through the psycho-physical organism" as though this were mere instrument. Yet the adjustment in question is an adjust

It remains to state in summary fashion what would constitute such a psychology of persons. (1) Its distinctive material would be society in the strict sense of this term, that is, persons communicating their desires and purposes to one another, and thereby co-operating with or opposing one another. (2) The focus of attention would be mental functions, that is, action conscious (or becoming conscious) of its own direction and approving (or disapproving) it. (3) The method would be genetic, that is, the material would be so analyzed and arranged as to exhibit the coming to conscious purpose of both the individual and the race. (4) Mental content, accordingly, would be treated from the standpoint of the use made of it in the interpretation of life's meaning, and mental mechanism from the standpoint of the purposed control of life. (5) The characteristic special problems would concern the experience of values: as, (a) What objects do men value? (b) What is it in each class of objects that makes them valuable? (c) How are the different classes of value related to one another? (d) In what parts of our total experience is each class of value realized? (e) In what order and by what method do valuations evolve?

ment "in" the psycho-physical organism. See pp. 15, 18. These phrases indicate the inadequacy of the merely biological point of view, but they do not establish a clearly different one. (2) His expositions of religious experience are most objective when he deals with the lower forms of religion, in which instinctive action is most prominent, and most subjective when he reaches the highest religion, in which self-realizations take more distinctively personal forms. By "subjective" here I mean particularly a disposition to reinterpret the values of the developed personal will. Perhaps the clearest example is Ames's treatment of the functions of the idea of God.