Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/661

 AN AUSTRIAN APPRECIATION OP LESTER P. WARD 645

shaven upper lip and chin after the English fashion ; his flowing side beard, although gray like his hair, had evidently in earlier years been blond, as the light-blue eyes also testified ; in a word, the Germanic type, which would please Chamberlain and Ludwig Woltmann. As it is, they will one day be proud of him, if they only make his acquaintance. It was Mr. Lester Frank Ward, announced as chief of a government geological bureau in Washington. He had come as a delegate appointed by the American government to the geological congress in Vienna, and had not hesitated to make the excursion to Graz in order to acquaint a European colleague in the field of soci- ology with his ideas. Now, I was already acquainted with Ward's works ; I had already been led by his letters to personal appreciation of him ; that he would succeed, however, in fiery debate, if not in con- verting, still in silencing me, I never should have believed ; and yet that is what happened.

When I read, years ago, in his Dynamic Sociology (second edi- tion, 1897) that applied sociology is still in its swaddling-clothes, and that it must first pass through all those phases of development, those processes of improvement by inventions and discoveries, which the natural sciences have already accomplished, before it would be able in a similar way to achieve those social conditions which would be parallel with technological achievements, and which would assure to all the people on the earth the highest possible prosperity, I laid the book aside with a skeptical shrug of the shoulders. " Another ideal- ist," I thought, " who confounds two things, science and art. Man can make and unmake many things, but he cannot make himself other than he is. We must be satisfied with understanding humanity, as we learn to understand the course of the planets, without demanding to change it. Not everything can be the subject-matter of an applied science, an art, and a technique. Among the objects to which this disqualification applies is humanity." That was my view, and I have always regarded all humanity-tinkerers as Utopians beyond the pale of science. At all events, none of them had ever been able to show sufficient scientific grounds for changing my view. Ward's Dynamic Sociology (which bears the subtitle Applied Social Science) among the rest failed also, whenever I took it in my hand, to convince me. I was shaken a little, to be sure, by its bold propositions : " We live in the stone age of political science," and, " In politics we are still savages." I was still further disturbed by the confidence with which he indicated the steps through which humanity, gradually advancing