d its product are the social consciousness. The social consciousness,
in its double aspect as process and product, is the social organism. The
controversy between the realists and the nominalists reduces itself
apparently to this question of the objectivity of social tradition and
of public opinion. For the present we may let it rest there.

Meanwhile the conceptions of the social consciousness and the social
mind have been adopted by writers on social topics who are not at all
concerned with their philosophical implications or legitimacy. We are
just now seeing the first manifestations of two new types of sociology
which call themselves, the one rural and the other urban sociology.
Writers belonging to these two schools are making studies of what they
call the "rural" and the "urban" minds. In using these terms they are
not always quite certain whether the mind of which they are thinking is
a collective mind, in Durkheim's realistic sense of the word, or whether
it is the mind of the typical inhabitant of a rural or an urban
community, an instance of "like-mindedness," in the sense of Giddings
and the nominalists.

A similar usage of the word "mind," "the American mind," for example, is
common in describing characteristic differences in the attitudes of
different nations and their "nationals."

The origin of the phrase, "the American mind," was political.
Shortly after the middle of the eighteenth century, there began
to be a distinctly American way of regarding the debatable
question of British Imperial control. During the period of the
Stamp Act agitation our colonial-bred politicians and statesmen
made the discovery that there was a mode of thinking and
feeling which was native--or had by that time become a second
nature--to all the colonists. Jefferson, for example, employs
those resonant and useful words "the American mind" to indicate
that throughout the American colonies an essential unity of
opinion had been developed as regards the chief political
question of the day.[42]

Here again, it is not quite clear, whether the American mind is a name
for a characteristic uniformity in the minds of individual Americans;
whether the phrase refers rather to an "essential unity of opinion," or
whether, finally, it is intended to cover both the uniformity and the
unity characteristic of American opinion.

Students of labor problems and of the so-called class