Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/662

 646 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

to completer stages of development, might arrive at a civic science which should compare with that of today as a modern machine gun with a primitive sling. As I have said, this audacity made me a little uneasy ; it threatened to overthrow my whole previous view of the world, in accordance with which the social process remains essentially the same, like every other natural process, since human nature from the first days of known history has not appreciably changed, and the masses likewise, so far as history reaches, have not changed their nature. " Alas ! " I thought, " my good friend in Washington is a very brainy fellow, but he is a paragon of an optimist. There is no help for him." Very likely my skepticism, perhaps a sort of indiffer- ence toward the bold flight of his sociological phantasy, which betrayed itself in my letters to him, prompted the man to search out in his nest this hopeless European " pessimist," in order to bring him more healthy ideas ; for, as he repeats over and over again, he recognizes no higher or more dignified task for a man than to publish his ideas as widely as possible. In a word, one day I welcomed him in Graz, and at once the hot fight began. To confess the truth at once, before I was aware, he had stormed my principal pessimistic position, and as I took leave of him at the station late in the evening, after a half-day's debate, I had the feeling that I had made the acquaintance of an intellectual giant of a type that I had never before met in reality. Since that time I am studying his works with quite other feelings from those with which I read them before. To be sure, no man can change his fundamental spiritual tone, nor can one easily get rid of a world-view which is a product of a long life. Per- haps one can never get rid of it. But I am free to confess that in place of the former feeling of confidence in my own views, perhaps of my own superiority to a " Utopian," there had come a feeling of hesitation, still more a feeling of admiration for a Menschhcits- Idealismits, of which we Europeans (with the exception of Franz Oppenheimer) are entirely incapable.

Now to the point. My most important position was : the essence development, the history of mankind, presents such a process. Ward's conception of the essence of this natural process is more magnificent than anyone in Europe has imagined. I will present it here, not from memory, but in the words of Ward himself, as they appeared recently in an American journal, in the form of an estimate" of Herbert Spencer's sociology.*
 * of the process of nature. We were entirely agreed that social

1 At this point the writer interpolates the whole of the article by Dr. Ward, " Herbert Spencer's Sociology," The Independent, March 31, 1904.