Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/844

 824 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

wholly wanting in merit. On the contrary, it results in immensely entertaining reading, in suggestiveness, in stimulation, in a dozen other desirable and admirable consequences ; but it cannot always con- jure the forces of serious conviction, and it greatly enhances the diffi- culties of the reviewer, who desires to confront fairly the warrant for his author's assertions. We shall be obliged, therefore, in examining Mr. Patten's psychology to treat it upon its apparent merits, and with- out complete assurance of the foundations upon which it rests.'

Sensory ideas, motor ideas, and an environment constitute the chief materials with which the author transacts his psychological business. The sensory ideas represent the information obtained by the struggling organism concerning its environment. The motor ideas represent the utilization by the organism of this information. Certain kinds of environment necessitate for self-preservation a relatively higher devel- opment of the sensory ideas, while other kinds demand more impera- tively a motor specialization. Significant factors in such differences of environment are the conditions of food supply, the local or cos- mopolitan nature of the social relations, the general economic circum- stances represented by the civilization, etc. On this basis, and apparently springing from the shifting interplay of these processes, Mr. Patten distinguishes four distinct types or classes of individuals, for which he has selected the picturesque titles of dingers, sensualists, stalwarts, and mugwumps." The dingers and the mugwumps do not lend them- selves readily to biographical treatment, the former being apparently too similar to one another and the latter not similar enough for cogent and profitable description. So Mr. Patten abandons them and con- fines his attention to the less refractory careers of the stalwarts and sensualists.

Mr. Patten's fundamental conception concerning sensory and motor

■The genealogy of Mr. Patten's interesting psychological doctrines may be somewhat more accurately detected in his monograph upon the Theory of Social Forces, 1 896. He has at least escaped the perverse fate which has so often overtaken economists and sociologists when discussing mental processes, for he shows himself wholly free from the fetishes of the faculty psychology. The present work devotes the opening chapter (fifty-six pages) to an explicit discussion of psychological prin- ciples, and the author states definitely in his preface that the remainder of the book is built upon these.

'There have been many hard sayings anent the mugwumps, but Mr. Patten's is quite the " most unkindest cut ^f all." lie says (pp. x-xi) : " Such men are vigorous in thought, but weak in action. They cannot act together, but make admirable critics. They are cosmopolitans in their sympathies, advocates of compromise in politics, and agnostics in religion, and may be called mugwumps."