Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/856

 840 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

sociology cannot go in its cure for the ills of life. " It cannot shield us from the sorrows that desolate the home and lie heaviest on the heart. It cannot minister balm to the wounded spirit, or bring peace to the troubled conscience, or lessen the anguish of bereavement, or dispel from our path the awful shadow that is creeping ever nearer and more near." That is, sociology is not substitute for religion, only hand- maid. It may help apply the remedy, never provide or supersede it. The aim must be something more than to make men comfortable, healthy, full-fed, easy-minded, and supplied with all manner of earthly satisfactions, (b) Sociological success is grounded in the new moral power introduced into the world by Christianity. Social ethics has religious base and presupposition. Sociology must have regard for the new ideas of human nature and human destiny which Christi- anity has introduced ; must look upon all men in the light of that new ideal of humanity which the life of Christ sets before us. "The pettiness and triviality, the sordid vileness and degradation, that but too often attach to the life of man become to the eye of Christian observation no longer its essence but its accidents, only the foul accre- tions that obscure its inherent glory We cease to despair of

the very worst." (c) The real sociological problem is not charitable relief of human wretchedness by sympathy and help to the forlorn and fallen, but how to dry up the poisoned springs from which that wretchedness proceeds. " The question is, not merely, Can we do anything to elevate and socialize the pariah class ? but it is the deeper one. Can anything be done to prevent its very existence ? Is it possible by a more searching diagnosis to detect and counteract the hidden disease in the social organism to which this abnormal product is due ? Is there no fundamental cure for this terrible concomitant of modern civilization — increasing comfort or luxurious affluence on the one hand, and at the same time, on the other, the rise and growth of a class of social outcasts, of masses of human beings sunk to the lowest point at which existence is endurable, who have nothing to lose and nothing to hope for, and whom sometimes, when the brute impulse in them is unkenneled, neither fear of God nor fear of man restrains ?" There is nothing novel or even debatable in these views of Caird, but they are all he gives us. Of the purely scientific and methodo- logical side of sociology he has nothing to say. If one sought a meta- physic for his sociology, Caird would have much to urge in favor of the organic, as against the mechanical, view of society and the world.

George B. Foster.