t, but by the simple radiation of the
mental energy which it contains.[38]

But the same social forces, which are found organized in public opinion,
in religious symbols, in social convention, in fashion, and in
science--for "if a people did not have faith in science all the
scientific demonstrations in the world would be without any influence
whatsoever over their minds"--are constantly re-creating the old order,
making new heroes, overthrowing old gods, creating new myths, and
imposing new ideals. And this is the nature of the cultural process of
which sociology is a description and an explanation.

VII. SOCIAL CONTROL AND THE COLLECTIVE MIND

Durkheim is sometimes referred to, in comparison with other contemporary
sociologists, as a realist. This is a reference to the controversy of
the medieval philosophers in regard to the nature of concepts. Those who
thought a concept a mere class-name applied to a group of objects
because of some common characteristics were called nominalists. Those
who thought the concept was _real_, and not the name of a mere
collection of individuals, were realists. In this sense Tarde and
Giddings and all those writers who think of society as a collection of
actually or potentially _like-minded_ persons would be nominalists,
while other writers like Simmel, Ratzenhofer, and Small, who think of
society in terms of interaction and social process may be called
realists. They are realist, at any rate, in so far as they think of the
members of a society as bound together in a system of mutual influences
which has sufficient character to be described as a process.

Naturally this process cannot be conceived of in terms of space or
physical proximity alone. Social contacts and social forces are of a
subtler sort but not less real than physical. We know, for example, that
vocations are largely determined by personal competition; that the
solidarity of what Sumner calls the "in" or "we" group is largely
determined by its conflict with the "out" or "other" groups. We know,
also, that the status and social position of any individual inside any
social group is determined by his relation to all other members of that
group and eventually of all other groups. These are illustrations of
what is meant concretely by social interaction and social process and it
is considerations of this kind which seem to justify certain writers in
thinking of individual persons as "parts" and of society as a "whole"