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Within the last few decades students of social phenomena have become aware of the existence of psychic factors as determining causes for the character of our civilization. Still more recent is the more precise recognition of the nature of these factors and their relation to our bodily functioning. We are slowly uncovering psychologic imperatives which control the character of our social customs and institutions, just as the biologic imperative is a dynamic determinant of our physical organism. Psychology has been accepted as a subdivision of sociology and it is rapidly assuming therein a place even more important than its position as a branch of physiology. I desire to point out what seems to me a tabooed and overlooked determinant of our androcentric evolution.
Without mature modes of thinking in the conscious supervision and check upon our mental activities, their object and meaning, we are but unconscious mechanical aggregates, physiological mechanism, undergoing automatic changes through blind reactions—mere creatures of impulse and habits. With the advent of mature self-consciousness a new force is introduced, which by virtue of its personal significance now attached to objective factors invests all human reactions with new qualities, just as water differs in its properties from a mere mechanical mixture of oxygen and hydrogen. We are psychically differentiated from other separate aggregates of the human mass only in so far as we have become conscious of personal aims and of a personal meaning in our endeavors. Moreover, the process of individuation becomes more marked as the social consciousness develops—that is, with the increase in the number of beings and data which in our consciousness are correlated to each present personal activity and meaning. We are mature in our modes of thinking just so far as we get away from the infantile