Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/848

 828 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

that the only tenable distinction applies to the nature and direction of their action, and not to the presence or absence of action as such.

In short, the description which Mr. Patten offers of his social classes not only enforces our strictly psychological contention regarding the indissoluble connection of sensory and motor processes, but it also suggests that Mr. Patten has worked with a somewhat narrow and arbi- trary conception of action. He seems always to have in his mind, when emphasizing motor activities, the more violent, or, at least, the more distinctly manual, forms of occupation. That these involve the larger muscles and a larger expenditure of muscular energy, hardly admits of debate. But if the distinctions at issue are those of motor as against sensory processes (granting the validity of the distinction for the sake of the argument), it will not do to substitute unannounced a distinc- tion resting on the size of the muscles employed, or the violence with which they are exercised, and it is something of this kind to which sev- eral of Mr. Patten's differentiations reduce themselves.

To sum up this part of our criticism we may say, then, that the notion of the separate development of certain ideas called sensory and certain ideas called motor is psychologically untenable : that the attempt to apply this notion in the classification of individuals on a psychic basis results, first, in the introduction of emotional characteristics supplemen- tary to the sensory-motor distinction, and, second, in a practical abandon- ment of the distinction in favor of a classification based on activities in which both sensory and motor elements are equally represented.

The relation of the environment to the organism involves problems which are usually regarded as biological rather than psychological. But there is, of course, also a psychological problem involved here, and we must notice briefly Mr. Patten's mode of handling it. Moreover, it is here that he shows most clearly the school in which his thought has developed. Waiving the frequent passages in which he finds it necessary, as would any writer employing the point of view of common sense, to speak of the individual as producing changes in the environ- ment, his fundamental doctrine, both from the psychological and the historical standpoint, is expressed in the proposition {cf. p. 14) that " every marked change in the environment gives rise to a new epoch in thought." He carries this further in the remarkable doctrine, whose validity falls outside the scope of this examination, that the constructive thought of each epoch follows the regular order: economics, aesthetics, morals, and religion, and that the ethical thought of any epoch — to illustrate in a single instance what Mr. Patten postulates of each of