Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/379

 METAPHYSICAL ELEMENTS IN SOCIOLOGY 367

If social will is conditioned by natural selection, not less is the power to convert will into deed conditioned by the conservation of energy ; M

and then goes on to insist that all social process is subject to the principle of conservation of energy, as when, e. g., he says :

If the available energy of the environment is wasted or in any way diminished, the social activity also must diminish. The evolution of new relationships of conscious association, and the accompanying development of personality, will be checked.

It is exactly analogous to a case in which the biologist should attempt to explain life-movements by calling them movements of oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon, etc., and by translating them into terms of the movement of these elements, which would be an altogether fruitless task as far as real advancement in science is concerned.

Professor Giddings does not seem to be self-consistent here. We are entirely ready to admit that sociological causation is something- unique, that it involves more than purely physical causation, just as protoplasm involves more than the above- mentioned chemical elements. And, consequently, we further contend that, since this sociological causation is, so to speak, a new product, the mode of interpretation which it demands must be different from that demanded by purely physical causation; in other words, that description must be supplemented by a moment of appreciation. Or, even admitting, for the sake of argument, that Professor Giddings's second diagnosis of social causation as physical process is a correct one, it in no wise vitiates the present contention that in an explanatory examination of social phenomena there is a moment of appreciation. That moment of appreciation, we would hold, is still present in what he calls interpretation " in terms of psychical activity ; " for some of the factors entering into social phenomena are of such a nature as to require appreciatively descriptive terms in order that they may become more than merely private inner experiences, and so be used at all in the determination of the causes of the phenomena in which they figure.

There is not alone a distinction between the causation of

"Ibid.