Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/730

 7 10 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Pure Sociology : A Treatise on the Origin and Spontaneous Development of Society. By LESTER F. WARD. New York : The Macmillan Co. Pp. xii+6o6. $4.

A GROUP of writers will be invited to discuss in this JOURNAL sali- ent features of this work. Meanwhile we record its appearance, and congratulate author, publisher, and the sociologists. A New York daily paper lampooned the book in a column editorial. It was a gratuitous advertisement of the effect which scientific treatment of any subject has on the hobo type of mind. A few days earlier the follow- ing was written in a private letter, by an American who has been studying philosophy and sociology in Germany for three or four years, after graduation from college and then from a newspaper office in this country :

It seems to me that the most important thing is self-knowledge, the knowledge of what you are doing in the world, and why you are doing it. America lacks self-knowledge, it seems to me, in several directions. No nation in the world seems to me so passionately engaged in dotnga.s America, and hardly any nation to be doing it so blindly.

Some of us think that the sort of thing which Dr. Ward is doing will pay larger social dividends, in the long run, than any equal invest- ment of energy in any other direction. We shall never know our- selves, individually or socially, till someone finds us out and helps us see ourselves in our processes of coming into being and of completing our being. Such knowledge is too wonderful for most of us at pres- ent, but a few minds demand it, and more will learn to swell the demand. It will be a long time before a more important contribution to social self-knowledge appears between the covers of a single book.

A. W. S.

Heredity and Social Progress. By SIMON N. PATTEN. New York : The Macmillan Co. Pp. 214. $1.25.

THERE is poetic justice in Professor Patten's conversion from a most inveterate prosecutor, if not persecutor, of the " biological sociolo- gists," and his appearance, not merely as a sociologist, but as one out- biologizing them all. I humbly confess this essay is beyond my depth. I shall make diligent search for someone to expound it. The vital and the psychical still seem so unlike to me, and both of them are still so mysterious, that putting the two mysteries together in this