Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/571

 REVIEWS 555

so far at any rate, there can be nothing to explain. The demand for explana- tion maybe taken as evidence that we have misconceived the facts. '

This disposition of the subject-object relation would seem scarcely to be expected from one who insists, as Mr. Ward does throughout both volumes, that the categorizing of experience is essentially a teleological affair. A little farther on, in treating the subject-object relation in individual experience, the object is found to be of a conative rather than of a cognitive nature.

Regarding experience in this wise as life, self-conservation, self- realization, and taking conation, not cognition, as its central feature, we must conclude that it is not that " content " of objects which the subject cannot alter, that gives them their place in its experience, but their worth, positive or negative, their goodness or badness, as ends or means to life."

Were this conative nature of the object pursued farther, perhaps the subject-object character of experience would not appear quite so gratuitous. In other words, it seems there is not sufficient justifica- tion given for regarding the subject-object character of experience as on an entirely different plane from the psychical-physical. The latter is regarded as a differentiation within experience — as conceptions evolved in the development of experience as means to its further progress. In the treatment of the subject-object nature of experience, therefore, it appears that the author's teleology is not quite thorough- going. The same appears true of the individual-universal relation. It, too, appears to be given, and to be a differentiation of rather than within experience.

Noting this latter distinction a little more in detail, we find it is a further differentiation of experience in its subject-object form. Thus giving in the last analysis of experience four terms — the subject and object of individual experience, and the subject and object of universal experience — Mr. Ward discusses the relation of the two subjects to each other and of the two objects to each other, and finds there is perfect continuity between them. But along with this finding he appears also to hold that the universal form of experience has developed out of the individual. Thus' we find:

To refute the dualism of ordinary scientific thought, then, it is neces- sary to show that the generalized or universal experience with which it is immediately concerned has grown out of, depends upon, and is really but an extension of our primary individual, concrete experience.*

■Vol. 11, p. I2q. 3 Vol. II, p. 153.

'Vol. II, p. 184. " < Italics mine.