in
some other sense than that in which a dust heap is a whole of which the
individual particles are parts.

Society not only continues to exist _by_ transmission, _by_
communication, but it may fairly be said to exist _in_
transmission, _in_ communication. There is more than a verbal
tie between the words common, community, and communication.[39]

Communication, if not identical with, is at least a form of, what has
been referred to here as social interaction. But communication as Dewey
has defined the term, is something more and different than what Tarde
calls "inter-stimulation." Communication is a process by which we
"transmit" an experience from an individual to another but it is also a
process by which these same individuals get a common experience.

Try the experiment of communicating, with fullness and
accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it be
somewhat complicated, and you will find your own attitude
toward your experience changing; otherwise you resort to
expletives and ejaculations. Except in dealing with
commonplaces and catch phrases one has to assimilate,
imaginatively, something of another's experience in order to
tell him intelligently of one's own experience. All
communication is like art.[40]

Not only does communication involve the creation, out of experiences
that are individual and private, of an experience that is common and
public but such a common experience becomes the basis for a common and
public existence in which every individual, to greater or less extent,
participates and is himself a part. Furthermore, as a part of this
common life, there grows up a body of custom, convention, tradition,
ceremonial, language, social ritual, public opinion, in short all that
Sumner includes under the term "mores" and all that ethnologists include
under the term "culture."

The thing that characterizes Durkheim and his followers is their
insistence upon the fact that all cultural materials, and expressions,
including language, science, religion, public opinion, and law, since
they are the products of social intercourse and social interaction, are
bound to have an objective, public, and social character such as no
product of an individual mind either has or can have. Durkheim speaks of
these mental products, individual and social, as representations. The
characteristic product of the individual mind is the percept, or, as