Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/730

 706 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Society is not a logical arrangement of categories, any more than a railroad bridge is. The bridge is specific material devoted to the work of carrying a load. Society is real people helping and hindering each other in carrying many loads; Ward's impersonal rendering of society goes about as far toward interpreting real society as the study of geometry would toward explaining the Brooklyn Bridge. If he had included sections on the categories of time, space, number, and causation, he would hardly have stretched the boundaries of sociology more than he has done.

Another line of criticism is equally pertinent. By the very terms of the distinction between "pure" and "applied" sociology it was foreordained that the emphasis should be thrown as exclusively as possible upon the mere form of acts, while their content, and particu- larly that part of it which is made up of purpose, is reduced to the lowest minimum. The effect upon me is that in reading the book I seem to be dealing, not with society at all, but with the mechanism of a ghost-dance. That is, in so far as Ward succeeds in carrying out his abstraction "pure sociology," he unconsciously withdraws from the domain of sociology altogether, and writes the closing chapters of biology. 1 In saying this I am not arguing indirectly for the divorce of biological and sociological factors that nature has joined together. I simply claim that, if we may place the beginning of sociology any- where, it must be at a point after conscious purposes have supplanted pack interests as the springs of action. The proportions of Ward's discussion that fall on the two sides of this boundary carry the center of operations entirely too far away from the essential interest of sociology.

Dr. Ward might reply that I am bound to wait for Applied Sociology, and to judge the two parts of his system together, before expressing an opinion. I admit the justice of the claim, and hope to be corrected by the system as a whole. At present I can judge only by the contents of Pure Sociology, and by the foreshado wings of Applied Sociology which are found in Dynamic Sociology. The impression which I receive is that Ward throws the center of gravity of sociology so far back in mechanics that he scarcely approaches the problem of inter- preting society as a combination of purposes, and of endeavors to

1 This is quite a different thing from the assertion that De Greef makes of Spencer in almost the same terms. De Greef is objecting to Spencer's use of the biological analogy. My point is that by a process of exclusion Ward virtually limits himself in a large measure to phenomena that are more biological than psychical.