Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/861

Rh and peculiar has been subordinated to the general and national. The unity of the older race was sensory. Men were held together by common environment. The unity of the English race is not environmental, but psychic. The race is held together by race ideals and social standards. The success of these means the success of the race. Our progress and ascendency depend upon decisions which have already been made. The types of man that will ultimately prevail, Dr. Patten tells us, are the stalwart and the mugwump. The sensualists and the dingers are fast disappearing. There has been very little growth in national literature and art, we are told, owing to the fact that these fields have been dominated by the steriles or racial suicides, who can have no permanent influence on the race. So long as aesthetic feelings are a useless variation, unconnected with vital activities, progress will be impossible. Can we agree with Dr. Patten that a literature which has produced a Shakespeare, a Milton, a Wordsworth, a Tennyson, a Browning, and a Kipling is undeveloped? Though the author tells us that a psychic change is taking place in the men of the race rather than a physical one in the women—making the men more and more subservient, willing to give, and the women less and less economic, eager to receive—we cannot accept this conclusion in the face of the facts of today which seem to prove the direct contrary. For when has woman been more economic, more capable of standing alone in the struggle for advancement than she now is?

To gain that higher civilization for which the laws of economics discover the necessary qualities demanded by the conditions of environment, men must become active, hopeful, and altruistic, full of confidence in the future and in the unseen. The effect of present economic conditions on character is to cause the sacrifice of the higher for the lower which is incarnation, just as the sacrifice of the lower for the higher is evolution.

Dr. Patten concludes with the statement that the adjustment of the race is about half finished. Literature and art have failed to become national except in the first part of this century. Philosophy and education still adhere to foreign models, and there has been little development in law and politics.

We have already called attention to the fact that the vital parts of Dr. Patten's theory—that new philosophies develop out of new economic conditions and not out of old theories—is opposed to the best historical and sociological views of our age. Take but a single instance. I quote from Topinard in the Monist for October, 1898.