Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/137

 KEVIEIVS 123

From Comte to Benjamin Kidd. The appeal to biology or evo- lution for human guidance. By Robert Mackintosh, Pro- fessor at Lancashire Independent College. Pp. xxiii-l-311. The Macmillan Co. Si. 50. This is precisely the sort of book to be expected from an author who confesses that he has been using Kidd's Social Evolution as a text- book for a class in sociology. Mr. Benjamin Kidd has about the same standing among the sociologists that Darius Green would have among the physicists. The author's evident assumption to the contrary excludes him from serious attention by the sociologists. Nothing that he can say about the content of sociological thought can have any weight with men who are familiar with the subject. Yet the book is of a sort to have vogue among people who cannot discriminate between writers who are authorities on their theme and those who are not.

It would be difficult to decide whether the author's attitude is most amateurish toward "evolution," or "biology," or "sociology." He knows what he thinks about the " moral consciousness," but he has a rare collection of misconceptions with reference to the thinking of the people who think most responsibly about those other subjects. The process which this type of thinker follows consists of turning a disap- proved conception into a bogie and then into a monster. For instance (p. 45), the innocent and scarcely novel suggestion is attributed to "some younger students of sociology" that "one ought to learn from history in what line things are moving, and then to help the movement with all one's powers." Whatever we may think about the adequacy of this formula, we can have little respect for the historic sense of a writer who has nothing better to say of the uses of history than is contained in the puerile retort : " When the first railway tubular bridges were erected — the Britannia bridge over the Menai Straits, the Victoria bridge at Montreal — they were made much heavier than has been found necessary in the light of fuller knowledge. What should we say of the wiseacre who proposed to carry out the principle of lightening railway bridges by constructing them of lace or gossamer?"! By steps like this the author reaches the profound conclusion that " history cannot guide us very securely" (p. 47). On the basis of this result, however, he proceeds in the same paragraph to dogmatize about the positive guidance that history can afford after all. This is fussiness posing as philosophy.

That the book cannot be treated seriously by the sociologists follows further from the author's assumption that the content of current