Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/279

 REVIEWS 261

influences appear in the group or series of facts under observation. The generalization would be upset instantly by the course of English history, for example. Everybody knows that, so far as conscious and avowed aims are concerned, the look of English leaders from time immemorial has been, inform, backward, not forward. They have demanded "the ancient rights of Englishmen," not "the normally potential type." What wonder that "sociology" is ridiculous, not merely in the eyes of business men, but to historians and other nearly related investigators, when sociologists persist in forcing fanciful interpretations upon facts which have been more truly explained by less pretentious students ?

The mistake in all this is, first, in crediting men in the past with a kind and degree of reflection upon social changes that they never bestowed; and, second, in assuming that a factor (^. ^., "speculative sense of the socially superior as a realizable social end," p. 60), which may, by a stretch of imagination, be traced in some past changes, is the significant and dominant influence in all changes. The credulity nec- essary for either assumption would be capable of taking Alice in Won- derland WitraWj. Not one person in a thousand in the United States today knows what a "social type" means. Possibly one hundred in a thousand would be able to entertain the notion if it were suffici- ently explained. Possibly ten out of the hundred more abstract thinkers might be capable of aiming their action toward an abstractly conceived social type. That this mental process is now or ever has been the typical, regular, usual determining influence in changing the forms of society is a supposition so extravagant that no student of history would feel safe in predicating it in full force of any single social change on a large scale. If there is a better prima facie case than the doctrinaire factor in the French Revolution, it does not occur to me, and I should like to see Dr. Crowell pick his way through even the more familiar records of that period, and bring his theory out intact.

When the author asserts (p. 63) that "no parliamentary discussion ever takes place without taking into account the effect of any measure on the type that normally tends to prevail," he is as near and as far from the truth as though he should say : "No fire department ever answers an alarm without taking into account the chemical relations of oxygen to the properties of other substances." The things taken account of in either instance may be translated by philosophers into terms of the rela- tions alleged ; but to assert that they are in that form in the minds of the actors, or that the efficient motives in the minds of the actors are considerations of that order of generality, is arrant nonsense. Con-