Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/153

 REVIEWS 139

guidance of the historian : The conscious and deliberate pursuit of ideal aims is the highest causality in human history" (p. 18).

I am glad to believe that Dr. Brinton underestimates the size of the goodly fellowship with which adherence to this claim associates him. To what extent he believes his view of history to be unique, he does not specify, but the thesis just quoted is offered as though it were in contrast with all prevalent views of history (p. 4). I recall at once, per contra, a paragraph of Thomas Hill Green:

"Because the essence of man's spiritual endowment is the conscious- ness of having it, the idea of his having such capabilities and of a pos- sible better state of himself, consisting in their further realization, is a moving influence in him. It has been the parent of the institutions and usages, of the social judgments and aspirations through which human life has been so far bettered ; through which man has so far realized his capabilities, and marked out the path that he must follow in their further realization" (Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 189).

To be sure Professor Green was not a historian, but this thought, so nearly identical with that expressed by Dr. Brinton, is fortunately at work among the historians. Interpretations of society which do not use this clue fall today into the rank of explanations of abstracted factors of social development. They cannot pass as revealers of the dis- tinctive element in the social progrejs. ALBION W. SMALL.