Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/626

 6l2 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Consider a social grouping sundered by caste lines. Mental stimuli do not pass from caste-men to men of another caste without essential alteration in kind, just because these stimuli are known to originate in the other caste. This felt separation works a fundamental qualitative alteration in the reaction to the stimulus. Between the two castes may be a co-ordi- nation — a relation as of master and servant, exploiter and exploited, but not that kind of relation which we regard as social in the ethical and democratic sense. The third premise does not here apply. Just in so far as lines of recognized class differences separate groups in a society like England, or lines of economic cleavage divide groups in America today, does the third premise fail of application, and in that measure our society fails to be democratic. An inductive sociology, in order to offer an accurate interpretation of the society, would have to make its premises to fit these conditions.

To enter into this thought needs more than a ten-minute paper. I wish however to make one application, viz., that what Professor EUwood has said about '"co-operation" does not sufficiently cover the point. I quite agree that "co-operation" is not the best term to describe the social process, not so good a word as "co-ordination" or "adaptation." Co-operation has an ethical implication. It is a teleological term, meaning adaptation to the mutual benefit of the units or factors coadapted. Now the democratic ideal enforces co-operation as a social goal. In a large sense co-operation is the social goal — although we must generously understand that co-opera- tion as a human social ideal is to be achieved through many forms of individual relation — through emphasis in some places upon individual as well as in other places upon communal action. Sociology does not seem to me to have accepted fully the practical applications to social programmes and public policies, of its own premises and doctrines. Perhaps we had best say that sociology has not worked out these applications. Is not that very task — the analysis of our own premises and their vigorous following-up till we bring them flush with, and express them in terms of, concrete present social problems — is not this task more urgent than the building of further systems of theory?

Edward C. Hayes, The University of Illinois

When people disagree too radically there is likely to be little immediate prospect of gain from discussion, but when one is so nearly in agreement with another as I am with Professor Ellwood, then discussion is particu- larly inviting and there is good ground for hoping that it may lead us a step nearer to the truth.

We used to hear a great deal about "the social mind," but the realiza- tion that society involves many separate consciousnesses, and has no inclusive single consciousness, forced the recognition that that phrase is only a figure