Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/427



REVIEWS 413

The difficulties grow only greater when we come to his statements concerning the relation of feeling to thought. While feeling remains a force, thought, which, according to his own theory, is evolved from feeling, is pronounced to be, not a force, but a relation. " There is no

transition possible from feeling to thought The distinction is

generic, and there are no intermediate stages or gradations from the

one to the other They are phenomena of entirely different

orders and do not admit of comparison .... since while one is in a sense measurable, being a force, the other is wholly incommensurable, being a relation " (p. 457). What has become of our scientific prin- ciple of continuity ? And what sort of a psychology is it that evolves relations out of forces, the incommensurable out of the measurable !

We find the same confusion and contradiction in his conception of the relation of structure and function. " The function is the end for which a mechanism is constructed " (p. 180). " The structures are only the means. Function is the end" (p. 181). This is pre-eminently true, but we then are startled with the statement that function is static because structure is static. " All considerations of structure being static, it is evident that all considerations of function must also be statical" (p. 181). " Function, simply as such, has no effect whatever in modifying structure" (p. 181). Biologists today, I suppose, will grant that function does not modify structure; it is not a vera causa. But, on the other hand, will they not say that function is structure undergoing modification ? A really static structure is a mechanism, not an organism, or, at least, it is an inert (relatively speaking) mechan- ism, not an operating mechanism.

He says that " the process by which structures are produced is not a dynamic process" (p. 222). " Dynamic movements are confined to structures already formed and, as stated, consist in changes in the type of these structures." At what point can it be said that structures are " already formed " ? All functioning is change of structure, and it is impossible to draw a line and say where this becomes a change in the " type " of structure. He himself asserts that this change of type "takes place by infinitesimal increments" (p. 222), and he calls atten- tion to the fact that " in biology it has now been learned that species are not fixed but variable, and that there has been a perpetual trans- mutation of species" (p. 224). How, then, can he speak of any living structure as static ? This is the characteristic of all life, of all growth. Without recognizing it, he has himself supplied the key to his own difficulty when he says, in another place, that the science of social