Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/579

 REVIEWS.

Human Nature and the Social Order. By CHARLES HORTON COOLEY. New York : Charles Scribner's Sons, 1902. Pp. viii + 404-

IN terms of his own thesis Dr. Cooley has transformed the social materials of his times into a personal product; his mind has reorgan- ized and reproduced the suggested material in accordance with its own structure and tendency. All will agree that the result is a " new and fruitful employment of the common material." This common mate- rial has been accumulating rapidly during the last two decades. James's notable chapter on "The Consciousness of Self;" Royce's papers on social consciousness; Dewey's insistence on the essentially abstract nature of both the individual and society conceived as separate ideas; Tarde's system with its trinity of imitation, invention, and opposition; Baldwin's dialectic of personal and social growth; Ross's vivid presen- tation of the ways in which society cleverly cozens its members; Giddings's consciousness of kind and analysis of the social mind these and many others are the current ideas upon which Dr. Cooley has freely drawn. The result is not, however, an " imitation," but an " invention."

In a style which often suggests Professor William James's pictur- esque conversational methods, the author sets up a thesis by the aid of which he restates many of life's most puzzling problems. There is no academic formality or scholastic strut about the performance. From title-page to finis one looks in vain for a new and eccentric termin- ology. The book abounds in brilliant obiter dicta. Although the work has a distinct unity, the reader often gets the impression of clever and discriminating essays covering a wide range of human experience. The volume is something of an anomaly in sociological literature, but it is none the less welcome for its very nonconformity. A number of illustrations are drawn from a study of the author's children, but the doting parent is successfully subordinated to the scientific observer.

Dr. Cooley's basal jjroposition is that human life is the real unity, of which individual and society are merely aspects which have been wrongly set in antithesis. This has led to a series of equally inde-

559