Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/791

 A THEORY OF SOCIAL MOTIVES 777

concept of highest efficiency seems to me to lie outside the field of an economics which makes the entrepreneur function central in theory. What answer can economics give to the question, At what point should the state step in and provide the laborer with those means of increasing his energy, power of attention, and skill which are denied him by economic limitations? Or to the question, On what principle may a wise balance be maintained between training in economic efficiency and training in citizenship and culture ? For an answer to such problems must we not look to a theory of social motives?

Alvan a. Tenny, Columbia University As those of you who have read Professor Williams' book An Ameri- can Town already known, he made in that work no mean contribution to sociology by intensive field-work. The psychological analyses in that mono- graph were very favorably received by reviewers. Moreover, in that work the facts behind the analyses were given in full. A careful statistical basis made the theories more than mere hypotheses. Theory thus rested upon such a substantial basis of fact in the monograph that it was natural to expect an equally convincing piece of work in the present paper. As it stands now, however, the theory of social motive outlined by Professor Williams this afternoon must be regarded as containing suggestive hypothe- ses and ideas rather than established fact.

Attempts to verify hypotheses by the method which Professor Williams uses, moreover, are subject to the possibility of serious error. For the method of studying motive by observation of conduct has difficulties quite as hard to overcome as has the legal method of taking testimony or the laboratory method of discovering physiological reactions that various stimuli produce. It is a very easy thing to attribute a given action to a wrong motive. For example : when a child I was doubtless thought instinctively cruel because I pulled off the wings of flies. In reality I hated to see the maid kill them and so caught as many as I could, took them out of the house and pulled their wings off in order that they might not fly back and be killed by the maid. Not knowing that pulling off their wings meant a

resting on statistics of wages, the latter on statistics of mental and moral qualities. He makes use of Pearson's study of the mental and moral qualities of children and students, there being no such study of the distribution of efficiency-qualities among the laborers in any industry. But Professor Pearson's investigation proves that such a study could be made and that these studies must be kept distinct from studies of wages, if we are to arrive at any more important conclusion than that "the laborer gets what he gets."