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concerned with the elaboration of a concrete political theory. The
claim
is that Mead's account of the genesis of mind and the self
furnishes the sociologist and the political theorist with a well elab–
orated scientific foundation. Our traditional conception of the in–
dividual has its roots in a diffuse theological notion of the soul, while
Mead's is susceptible of empirical verification. Mead did not draw
out aU the implications of his thought. He was however quite aware
of the fertility of his conceptions, and in the last section of
Mind, Self
and-Society
sketched some of these implications out. His thought did
not register our contemporary awareness of the struggle of classes in
our modem world. In so far, it is deficient. But it is not defective,
for the conception of the class struggle can be easily brought into it
without serious reconstructions of Mead's fundamental ideas.
There is no space in which to refer, however hastily, to a number
of other aspects of Mead's philosophy which give it special relevance
to
us. But a few words at least must be said about his theory of
history. ·One of the problems to which he gave much fruitful thought
was
the problem of time. For Mead the past is generated in the pres–
ent, for the _latter is the locus of
re~ty.
Time is not a medium,
existing indepedently of the physical universe and within which it
moves. And this explains why each generation must reconstruct the
past
in
accord with the needs of the present. The contemporary his–
torian
may
think
that he is approaching a fixed past through his own
more accurate account. But actually what he is doing is creating
a
past.
Thus history becomes a methodological blue-print which
jUstified itself in terms of the successful control it enables us to achieve
of
our future.
It will be some time before we are able to adjudge precisely
the value of Mead's contribution to contemporary thought, for an
exact estimate must wait until his ideas have been translated into
terms
available to others besides professional philosophers, and that
is
a slow process. It will be difficult to estimate how original was his
contribution to the tradition of pragmatism. For Mead worked in
the closest cooperation with Dewey since their early days in Michigan;
they went together to Chicago; and even after Dewey left Chicago
the cross-fertilization of their minds must have continued until Mead's
premature death. But it is not too early to assert with confidence that
1m
contribution is of very great value. And for this reason students
of
philosophy
will
be grateful to Professor Charles W. Morris and his
mociates, whose arduous editorial labor saved for us the fertile
material of Mead's lectures and unfinished papers which have ap–
peared
in
this volume and in the two previous posthumous ones.
ELISEO VIVAS
