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The differentiation of affects which the title of this paper implies cannot be made without a great number of qualifications.
First, it is impossible even to imagine an affect without the bearer thereof, which is always a person. Are not then all affects purely personal? On the other hand, it is just as impossible to imagine a purely personal affect—even in a semicivilized individual—in which social motivations do not play a variable and, in the main, a considerable part. Confusion seems therefore unavoidable. At the present state of our knowledge, perhaps the most we can expect from the examination of personal and social affective reactions is a mild degree of clarification, rather than a solution of the problems involved.
Pre-freudian excursions into social psychology were mostly nonpsychological—purely morphological or phenomenological—because they were based on synthetic observations and the intuition of the individual writer. Most of the writers were sociologists; a few were general or philosophical psychologists. Some of the intuitive divinations of these writers proved quite correct, but as these men did not have at their disposal a comprehensive psychology of the unconscious, the greater part of their brilliant intuitions remained conceptual constructions. Le Bon recognized the rôle of unconscious factors in the behavior of crowds, but having no conception of the dynamics or the structure of the unconscious, he was never able to state clearly the nature of the unconscious factors which enter into social psychology. Le Bon also recognized the hypnotic, contagious nature of mass behavior. So did Tarde, who formulated his laws of imitation and synergic