Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/582

 562 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

This brief summary is meant merely to give an idea of the scope and method of Dr. Cooley's book. It affords no adequate view of the argument; it sadly misrepresents the style and form of treatment; and wholly omits the illuminating observations, the sane philosophy of life, and the genuinely stimulating moral tone which enrich and pervade the volume.

As a destructive criticism alike of the artificial individualism which we have inherited from the last two centuries and of the sociological concepts which Mr. Spencer and the " social forces and tendencies " school have popularized, this book renders effective service. The old hard-and-fast distinctions, the clean-cut logical counters "individual" and " society " are badly blurred and fused. Under this concrete, detailed study of the person new complexities emerge and the old, simple labels seem pitifully inadequate.

As a reconciliation of extreme views of individuals and society Dr. Cooley's work is of first-rate importance. In "pouring out the bath- ing water of individualism he has not spilled out the baby, individu- ality." In fixing attention upon the life-process as a whole, turning now to the personal, now to the collective, aspect, the author produces the effect of unity with marked success. While his results are stated in less eccentric and peculiar terms, they do not differ fundamentally from the formulations of others. For example :

Society, like every living advancing whole, requires a just union of stability and change, uniformity and differentiation. Conformity is the phase of stability and uniformity, while non-conformity is the phase of differ- entiation and change. The latter cannot introduce anything wholly, but it can and does affect such a reorganization of existing material as constantly to transform and renew human life. (P. 274.)

This seems to be putting in other language what Professor Baldwin more ponderously sets forth in his dialectic of social growth as the interplay of the particularizing (i.e., differentiating, non-conforming) individual and the generalizing (i.e., stable and uniform) society. There is much, too, which reminds one of Professor James. To both James and Baldwin Dr. Cooley expresses indebtedness.

To the habitual inveterate individualist much of the analysis of the person will be far from convincing. The author is by no means a mystic, and he protects himself cautiously, yet one might easily get the impression that "you" and "I" are practically identical, that there are "no fences in this field" a favorite phrase and that the "self" is a somewhat elusive, not to say amorphous, thing. In dis-