Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/135

Rh declares that "Impulsive social action varies inversely with the habit of attaining ends by indirect and complex means" and that "The degree of sympathy decreases as the generality of resemblance increases" The writer believes it safe to assert that the more prevalent the man-to-man struggle in a society, the less pronounced is the group-to-group struggle.

The typical relation, however, that the investigator aspires to establish is that of cause and effect. The number of such relations established is a true measure of scientific advancement, and it is therefore a great pity that a generation of sociologists spent their time gathering the Dead Sea fruit of analogical and genetic laws, instead of seeking those laws of causation which are the peculiar treasure of a science. Within the last dozen years, however, scholars have thrown themselves into the quest for true causes, and their gains have availed to take away from sociology the reproach of barrenness. Those spokesmen of the more developed branches of knowledge who, because of her early errors of method, dispute the youngest of the sciences her rightful place, are simply ignorant of what is being done.

We have Tarde with such laws as Tradition is authoritative and coercive in proportion to its antiquity, and The likelihood of a given invention varies directly as the number of minds possessing and capable of fusing the ideas composing it, and inversely as the number of antecedent inventions necessary to be made. With regard to social organization Giddings sets up two laws, one that it is coercive in proportion as the population is heterogeneous, and the other that it is coercive in proportion as sympathetic and formal like-mindedness predominates over deliberative like-mindedness.

Veblen has established the vielsagend law that in proportion as a leisure-class becomes influential, the reigning standards of right, of decency, of beauty, and of ritualistic fitness, conform to the principle of Conspicuous Waste. Bouglè has won ground from the ideologists by proving that notions of human equality make their way in proportion as society becomes large, dense, mobile, complex, and unified. Miss Simons has formulated for assimilation five laws which so thoroughly reveal the process that the subject is for the present done with. The writer, in addition to the laws he has formu-