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 306 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

but not in so elementary and easy form. Compared with Giddings* book this one is less pretentious, less speculative, and less fanciful. I should say that its author has worked his way through some of the plainer preliminary commonplaces of sociology, and his conclusions so far are set down in a way that will prove helpful to others who have not yet had that experience. The book seems to me on the whole a sane expression of opinion about more obvious phases of social phe- nomena, by a man who has had good introductions to most forms of contemporary thought. Whether he has had immediate scientific con- tact with reality at any point I am unable to judge.

The most serious charge which I should bring against the book as a tool for beginners is that it stops with giving them the author's views. It does next to nothing in the way of pointing out how they are to exercise their own powers in deriving knowledge of society. From allusions here and there I infer that the author had theological students chiefly in mind. The method of the book does nothing to correct the inevitable tendency among men of their usual intellectual antecedents to be satisfied with approach to reality mainly through books. I am very sure that the wisest teachers will one day agree that much study of social activities in the concrete should precede study of sociology. This book does not seem to have broken with the superstition that we may arrive at scientific knowledge of society by working over unscientific opinions about society. The author has not himself gone far astray in this direction, because he has evidently tried to systematize conclusions which are reasonably clear, and has with- stood the temptation to get credit for originality by unwarranted theorizing. Nevertheless his manner of treatment and the bibliogra- phy appended lead me to the belief that his own method of work is practically the averaging of essays.

Whatever be our hypotheses about society or sociology, all investi- gators ought to be agreed that an essential condition of the advance of social science is accumulation of precise data all along the line. Of catchweight evidence we have had enough. Yet men who do not count on raising grapes from thorns nor figs from thistles still imagine that dialectic agitation, if kept up long enough, will churn ignorance of society into social science. I say this the more freely in this connection because the occasion is rather in the omissions than in the commissions of the book. I find, however, that in the treat- ment of social development the author has done little to show how