Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/570

 550 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

(4) coordinate with the other three, as a simple process proceeding from the individual alone. But passing this, and referring to the "complex activities" in the same chapter, we find that the author has created an order of sequence in the development of social activities which bids defiance to facts in most wholesale fashion. The alleged order of activities is (i) economic, (2) legal, (3) political, (4) — "which presupposes all the others that have been described" — "cultural" (p. 45). Whether the four categories are the most discriminating in this connection is a question by itself. That there is any such lineal uni- formity as Professor Giddings asserts in the emergence of these activ- ities is contrary to all the evidence.

But the fatality of phrases appears when the attempt is made a few pages later (45-7) to use the first four categories as clues to " motives of activity." The author could hardly have gone about the work more sagaciously, if he had been deliberately bent upon creating such confu- sion in students' minds that they could never again use any of the psychological analyses which have organized this chaos into approxi- mate order. I do not recall a more fantastic substitution of phrases for precision than in the next following passage (pp. 47-52) on "The Methods of Activity." The arbitrary use of the terms "attack" and "impression " betrays an irresponsibility to accredited usage which is neither serviceable nor excusable. I have seldom experienced a more definite shock than when I turned the leaf and read, at the top of p. 50, that "all these methods .... are so many modes of one universal method .... called conflict"! If Professor Giddings had pro- mulgated a theory of optics in terms of the thesis, "all optical phe- nomena are consequences of a particular physical property, viz., white;" and if in an elementary text-book he had concluded his analysis of optical phenomena with the assertion, "all these methods of action are so many modes of one universal method, viz., black" he could not have been more mystifying than in his manipulation of phrases to make "consciousness of kind" as the principle fit with "conflict" as the method of all social activities.

Other illustrations of the same futility of phrases are apparent in the whole discussion of the "unit of investigation" (pp. 9-11). It is a profitless magnification of the commonplace. Of course we are deal- ing with "human individuals in conscious combination." At least they are conscious, though not necessarily conscious that they are in combination. It may impress some imaginations as a very consider- able advance in knowledge to be able to vary the verbal symbol for