Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/276

 258 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Dr. Crowell's work deserves very much more attention than it is likely to get. His powers of analysis and abstraction are evidently of high order, but nothing less than overpowering sense of professional duty will induce anybody to attempt playing the Bowditch to his Laplace to the extent of puzzling out the meaning to the end. This is unfortunate, for the author uses some of the most timely conceptions in sociological theory, and there is hidden away in the excessively obscure form of the book some extremely useful discrimination.

To begin with the least essential fault, it is to be regretted that the author has not been more precise, or at least more perspicuous, in the use of terms. He uses many familiar words in more than one sense, and just when it is necessary to be sure of their exact force they apparently mean something to the author which they do not suggest to the reader ; or they stand for one of several concepts, and the reader cannot tell which of them to select. If I am not mistaken, this is true of the very important term "type." It sometimes means a real correlation of persons. Again it means a subjective construction of represented persons into conceptual relations. Still again it means a potential, but unimagined, arrangement of persons. Possibly it has other shades of meaning. At all events, I fail to see how either of above senses fits in certain cases.

The same might be illustrated in the case of the term "social." It is so liberally used that I find myself unable to associate distinct notions with it in a particular case. For example, on p. 14, the word is used as substantive or adjective eight times, and I find it impossible to frame a theory that will give to the term the same force in each instance. In connection with the first line of p. 19, the query arises, "Would the phrase 'social man' mean the same thing if the attributive were omitted ? " If not, where have we a specimen of "man" not "social," and are there enough of him to form a class which we must exclude from sociological consideration ? The next sentence seems to imply that "social man " and " man " are interchangeable terms for the genus that sociology studies. This conclusion is reinforced by the assertion (p. 49):

Sociology has nothing to do with any human being except as he is or has been a member of a collective kind, and being or having been such, it has everything to do with him that in any way gives him a social value.

Not least among the difficulties of the reader, therefore, is his per- plexity about when to interpret the term " social " as adding something to a proposition, and when to treat it as dead wood. What precise