Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/849

 REVIEWS 829

these fields of reflection — springs entirely from its own economic ante- cedents and not from the ethical thought of preceding epochs.

So far as there is a psychology involved in this conception of the significance of the environment for the organism, it is the position of the extreme associationists, the conception of a relatively quiescent mind bandied about by the forces of its surroundings. Against this doctrine the apperceptionists have waged a vigorous and generally successful campaign, emphasizing its decrepitude on the side of both substantiating facts and coherent theory. I cannot discover that Mr. Patten examines systematically the warrant for assigning to the eco- nomic environment such tremendous intellectual consequences, while seeming to assume that it is itself in its origin relatively independent of consciousness. If Mr. Patten means his statements merely as an account of certain periods in history and chooses to begin with the appearance of apparently new economic epochs, there is little ground for questioning his procedure. But this does not seem to be his inten- tion, and we are obliged to protest that his theory is one-sided. No one doubts that economic conditions have been factors of utmost moment in the development of reflective consciousness, but the psy- chological doctrine (leave alone the historical verification of the impli- cations) here advocated (p. 43), in accordance with which these eco- nomic conditions are made to appear as the sole real causes of the trend of reflective thought, can only be established by making the term " economic " cover all the other fields from which its application has by implicit definition already been distinguished.

Mr. Patten is, however, better than his theory, and he actually traces for us, in his exceedingly graphic manner, a number of instances in which, so far as concerns the individual, the strict validity of his theory is refuted. Indeed, one of his more important doctrines lends itself only reluctantly to reconciliation with the conception we have just discussed. Character, which, it will be remembered, is connected with motor response, is, he says, enduring, whereas the environment is constantly undergoing change. This leaves us with the somewhat perplexing psychological problem on our hands of accounting for a relatively stable set of motor activities, manifesting considerable inde- pendence of changes in the environment, and a highly unstable set of reflective thought processes, varying with every important alteration in this environment. Leaving this problem out of consideration, how- ever, the point we wish to emphasize is the absolute dependence of only part of the processes of consciousness upon the environment, i. e.,