THE STATE AS A MANIFOLD OF EVENTS
Implications have continually been drawn in the foregoing pages about the bearing of the intensive study of individual personalities upon the meaning of the political process as a whole. Since the psychopathological approach to the individual is the most elaborate procedure yet devised for the study of human personality, it would appear to raise in the most acute form the thorny problem of the relation between research on the individual and research upon society. We are therefore justified in devoting more extended attention to the theoretical problem involved than we have yet taken occasion to do.
It may be asserted at the outset that our thinking is vitiated unless we dispose of the fictitious cleavage which is sometimes supposed to separate the study of the "individual" from the study of "society." There is no cleavage; there is but a gradual gradation of reference points. Some events have their locus in but a single individual, and are unsuitable for comparative investigation. Some events are widely distributed among individuals, like breathing, but have no special importance for interpersonal relations. Our starting-point as social scientists is the statement of a distinctive event which is widely spread among human beings who occupy a particular time-space manifold.
Subjective events occupy definite positions in the flow of events, and the problem of explanation is the problem of locating stable relations. Since subjective events are
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