Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/315

 REVIEWS 301

That it is not a "datum" at all, but only a dictum, appears after we have searched the book in vain for any authorization of it. The nearest approach to an attempt to give it logical sanction is in the remainder of the passage just quoted :

Since contract and alliance are phenomena obviously more special than association or society, and imitation and impression are phenomena obviously more general, we must look for the psychic datum, motive, or principle in the one phenomenon that is intermediate. Accordingly the sociological postulate can be no other than this, namely : The original and elementary subjective fact in society is the consciousness of kind. 1

This is as though we were searching for the greatest common divisor of two numbers, say 50 and 500. Some one has proposed 10; but inspection shows this to be too small. Another proposes 1000; but inspection discovers that this is too large. Whereupon we con- clude : " As all possible wrong solutions have been tried, the only term that is intermediate between 10 and 1000 must be the correct solution. That half-way term is 495 ; q. t. d" Need the illustration be amplified ? Further inspection would show that the first assumption is false, viz., that all possible wrong solutions had been tried. There is the arith- metical mean, for instance, and then the geometrical mean, and then nearly a thousand other wrong proposals which we might test before the possibilities of exclusion would be exhausted. Secondly, granting that 495 is the one term intermediate between 10 and 1000, we find by inspection that the inference does not follow, viz., that this inter- mediate term is the divisor sought.

It is almost as plain from inspection that Giddings has assumed a conclusion for which there is no warrant in any visible premises. In the first place, a hundred other debatable explanations of social reac- tions are conceivably possible. In the second place, granting that " imitation " is one extreme error, and " contract " the opposite extreme, it is neither demonstrated that consciousness of kind is "the one phe- nomenon that is intermediate," nor that, if it is, it is " the original and elementary subjective fact in society." It is not even demonstrated that there is any such thing as "an original and elementary subjective fact in society," in the sense in which (iiddin^s uses the expression. The "original fact," so far as our power to represent reality can go, may turn out to be a congeries of facts, reducible only by inference to hypothetical unity. Giddings wants us to deduce the facts from his

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