Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/321

 REVIEWS 307

vague and hypothetical is most of the biological interpretation which he assumes in stating the apparent course of social evolution. Every man who presumes to deal with sociology ought to resolve that whatever else he does, he will convince his students that further knowledge of society is not to be gained by rearranging the inexact notions stored up in the symbols of current language, but by patient examination of social details and reconstruction of unauthorized concepts.

The book is full of indications that the author is not yet sufficiently at home among the sociologists to give the essentials and the non- essentials of their procedure proportionate attention. He betrays more nervousness than necessary about trivialities, and even personal- ities, which he imagines to be of some general significance. This might be illustrated throughout his discussion of the organic concept of society. He has evidently failed to distinguish between individual versions of social relations and the essential conception, about which there is really no disagreement. He apparently prefers on the whole to class himself with those who do not call society an organism (339), yet I doubt if even Spencer meant more by the organic analogy than is implied throughout this book. Everybody who finds it worth while to study society at all does so because he believes that there are coherences, both contemporary and consecutive, between social activi- ties. If this were not so a science of society would be as impossible as a science of a sand-heap. Froude in his youth asserted the sand-heap analogy, but he could not hold to it and study history. If we agree with the later and wiser Froude, we are at one on the fundamental relation. Our differences are upon the extent to which social coher- ences are made out, and the best names to give them. Even if we were to admit that Lilienfeld and Spencer and Schaffle worked out the organic analogy in tedious and extravagant detail, it remains true that all this was necessary to hammer the perception of omnipresent social coherence into the brains of a few observers of society. The book before us could not have been written had not Schaffle's/fa// und Lcben given the impulse. I protest against the ingratitude of denying to these pioneers their due. No expert can read this book without trac- ing the direct and indirect influence of the Schaffle school. I do not mean that the book contains indications that its author has read Schaffle. He has at least caught up so much from the method which Schaffle has done most to form that I fail to understand how ru