Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/593

Rh an equation that would show how to calculate my line of choice. In fact, all that it can do is to wait till I have made my choice, and then say: "He did that because he thought it would get him the greatest good." This is merely saying: "He did it because he did it."

But the troubles of this "exact" law do not end here. Suppose I have a classmate in precisely the same circumstances. He considers the same possibilities and chooses the same occupation. It turns out in half a dozen years that one of us has worked conspicuously harder than the other. Why? The reasons may be either purely in ourselves or in the different specific relations in which the end chosen may appear to us individually, or in a combination of the two variants. In either case, what becomes of the exactness of the "law of parsimony," unless we reduce it to the identical proposition? The law of gravitation is popularly supposed to be exact. For ordinary purposes it means "what goes up must come down," or what is up must go down if support fails. The formulas of falling bodies give us the more precise contents of the law. If the "law of parsimony" can be made to mean anything that both has a content, and at the same time can be compared with the law of gravitation in exactness, Dr. Ward could write his name forever by the side of Newton's by showing it.

Some minds may be put to rest by assertions that psychic facts are phenomena just like physical facts, and that they may be reduced to laws as exact as physical laws. We have nevertheless not yet eliminated from the world the embarrassing fact that men do every day "make the worse appear the better reason." So long as this continues to be the case any mechanical formula of human actions must be taken in a Pickwickian sense.

As I intimated above, these criticisms touch merely upon relatively trifling externalities. They relate to marginal matters, and do not reach the substance of this altogether remarkable book. I do not hesitate to pronounce it one of the rare books which will assert a permanent place in the history of knowledge. It seems to me, however, that one or more of the things which I am pointing out will probably catch the attention of types of people already prejudiced more than enough against sociology. They will be glad to find in them further pretexts for pleading the baby act, instead of thinking the sociological argument through to the end. The structure that Dr. Ward has built is not to be confounded with the staging which he used in the building. We shall come later to the essential value of the work.