Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/568

 548 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Wilson. For scientific purposes, the difference is like that between one of Turner's suggestions on canvas of a stormy day on the English coast and an admiralty chart of the same spot. In the National Gal- lery the impressionist's work would be most admired. In the wheel- house of the skipper feeling his way into port the work of the realist and the literalist would be of most use.

Professor Giddings does not make his readers confront the thing that is, but he shows very early that his doctrines deal with something possibly quite different, viz., those impressions and conceptions which things, or their symbols, have deposited in his mind. He imagines that he is describing when he is only interpreting in advance of descrip- tion. What he believes to be objectivity of the most penetrating order is extremely defective objectivity. It promotes a factor of reality to supremacy, if not to monopoly, in the object characterized. For instance, he does not show his readers how to find out for themselves what " society " is. Instead of that he asks us to think about society in terms of an abstracted phase of societary reality, thus : " Society, then, as a mode of activity of intelligent individuals is the cultivation of acquaintance and like-mindedness" (p. 5); and again: "A society is a number of like-minded individuals — socii — who know and enjoy their like mindedness, and are therefore able to work together for com- mon ends" (p. 6). These definitions compel us either to rule out of consideration many, and perhaps all, of the associations of people which would best reward study, or to credit them in advance by defi- nition with a character which is certainly not correctly expressed in these formulas. No fair and natural interpretation of these definitions could be made to admit the following into the category "societies": the English during the Wars of the Roses ; the Germans during the Thirty Years' War; the Italians from Odoacer to Garibaldi; the French most of the time from Philip I to President Faure ; the Ameri- cans from Jamestown and Plymouth to the Cuban war.

If we could agree in advance that any selected national, not to say international, groups are "societies," it would be play for a student of history to make out from the evidence a strong case for the gener- alization : "A society is a number of ?/«like-minded individuals who know and enjoy their unlike-mindedness." Nobody would concede that this thesis tells the whole story, but it formulates so important an element in the case that no one not mortgaged to a prejudice would be satisfied with Professor Giddings' thesis after considering other aspects of the facts.