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 312 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

much to end unedifying contentions about things upon which there is more radical and general agreement than the disputants imagine. After a terminology peculiarly and literally appropriate to social rela- tions shall have been invented, it will be found that none can adopt that language with less modification of anything essential in their for- mer conceptions than Schafrle and those who owe most to his leader- ship. If the men who feel free to condemn him had read his first edition they would have found in his own explanations anticipation of everything important in the criticisms of his enemies. Since these externalities are of no essential value in his own estimate, and since he has now put his analysis in more matter-of-fact form, it is to be hoped that the sociologists who have disposed of him so summarily hitherto will realize that they may possibly learn something by looking at the world for a while through his eyes.

In a few paragraphs 1 Schafrle makes his programme perfectly clear. Sociology, in his view, has for its task the construction of a philosophy of the special social sciences. The completion of this task obviously waits on the completion of those special sciences. This almost self- evident proposition is still denied by the speculative sociologists. The denial involves the naive assumption that generalizations of the second power, so to speak, can be positive, although generalizations of the first power, out of which they are derived, may still be hypothetical, or even if the simpler generalizations have not been reached. Schaffie's position, if I understand it, might be illustrated in this way. If dis- coverable factors in a given social condition are, first, an economic impulse, second, a conscious political purpose, third, certain racial affinities or antipathies, fourth, definite ethical tradition ; acquaintance with the characteristic action of each of these factors is a condition of solving the problem of their combined action. By how much more is a general theory of social reactions dependent upon knowledge of the elements of those reactions !

Schafrle replies at the outset to three leading objections ; first, there is no need of a. science of society, in addition to psychology, /. <?., to the science of the psychical life of the individual ; second, a general soci- ology implicitly rejects the claims of the special social sciences ; third, a philosophy of the totality of special social sciences is superfluous. The answers are, in brief, first, the human individual detached from community with others is unthinkable; in all probability individual

1 Vol. I, Book I, Sec. I.