Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/280

 262 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

gressmen voted for or against forcible dealings with Spain because they wanted to avenge the "Maine," or to stop cruelty, or to remove obstacles to trade, or to secure their own reelection. Their votes will affect future types of correlation in the United States, in Cuba, in Spain, and perhaps in the rest of the world ; but that consideration of social types as types ever entered the thoughts of 5 per cent, of them is too absurd for second mention by anybody but a speculative sociologist. How can we expect to win the respect of sane men for sociology if we persist in making it a farrago of conceits that vaporize at the first contact with reality ?

The method is still more radically at fault in selecting for examina- tion purely conjectural conditions, as though they were real reactions encountered in the course of observation. The first step is, therefore, to beg the question of fact. Thus (p. 65) :

The problem then is to find, for the right grasp of the societary processes, a guiding standard or progressive point of view going before and giving pre- cision of aim to the tendential forces, so that these various type-developing tendencies may find the forces to which they are capable of converging, etc.

Everything that the author has said up to this point makes it neces- sary to understand the above as though he had said expressly that the desired standard is consciously in the minds of effective members of society. It is, however, a plain begging of the question to proceed upon the assumption that there is any such conscious standard. The hypothesis of a " tendency-controlling criterion " is perfectly legitimate, if used as a pointer in the collection of evidence. It is entirely ille- gitimate when taken as an established position from which argument may proceed. Nobody has proved that such a conscious criterion exists. On the contrary, everybody who has given much attention to the facts, including the present author when in a realistic temper, doubts the wide prevalence of such a state of consciousness. A bigger book than the volume in hand could be filled with evidence against the hypothesis easier than the author could convince a jury of historians that any single case of social modification may be accounted for by the assumption. It is pure illusion to suppose, therefore, that a principle so utterly supposititious can be made a scientific basis for pedagogy or anything else. It has no feet for its own support.

It is difficult to understand how a writer so intelligent as the pres- ent author can have come to maturity in this half of the nineteenth century with so little respect for the requirements of exact science. It would seem as though he would find it occasionally necessary to drop