Few men of his day lived life more fully than George Mead and fewer still were better qualified to write about it. He was an active participant in civic organizations, took his duties as a citizen seriously, and had traveled far and often so that nothing human was alien. He had read and remembered the books---all the important books in every department of philosophy, the social sciences, and mathematics, not excluding fiction and poetry. And besides all this, his was "a seminal mind of the very first order" which enabled him to see relations and gain insights which gave to familiar facts an undiscovered significance. This above all---he lectured on social psychology for nearly forty years, even before the term became current, and hundreds of scholars now teaching and writing gratefully acknowledge him as their most stimulating teacher.But Mead never wrote his book on social psychology. The present volume was assembled from the notebooks of students who heard him in the latter part of his career. The editor has, unfortunately, seen fit to give it another title and has taken the liberty to rearrange the material in a fashion that will be deprecated by many who knew Mead and thought they understood him. The task of the editor under such circumstances is one of unusual difficulty; and disappointment over the imperfections of the result yields to the feeling of gratitude to those men who did the best they could, according to their lights, and all who are interested in social psychology should be thankful for even this much.
