Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/759

 NOTES AND ABSTRACTS 735

and Ezra. In Greece the first two stages only were reached, and then dis- integrating strife sent to destruction the most brilliant and most gifted of the ancient races. In modern times a Rousseau followed on the heels of a Hobbes and ushered in the age of revolutions. The reconstruction between the sense of individual sovereignty and the demands of the larger social world is even now being effected.

The same trinity of stages is evident in the relation of the individual to organized religion. Passing over the cases of India and Israel, we may see the first stage in the intense institutionalism of the pre-Reformation period. After the reaction which followed, and in some measure continues, we find ourselves again facing the problem of reorganization. And its solution is to be found in the fact that the individual cannot be himself apart from this larger life, from which, in the period of alienation and estrangement, he has separated himself. On this basis the church is seen to be, not an institution which already exists without the individual, to which he simply gives allegiance. It is simply the religious life which he has in common with others expressed in an organized form. REV. T. D. STOOPS, in International Journal of Ethics, October, 1903.

E. B. W.

The Sociological Concept of Liberty. The most enlightened of our age are still haunted, without being conscious of it, by the religious and metaphysical specters of other days. The idea of free-will, reappearing under the form of the vague notion of liberty, is bowed down to by all, but defined by none. In what does liberty consist? A free act is an act of coercive force, of power, exercised despotically by individuals or groups upon external nature or upon men. Liberty and despotism are sister and brother, often enemies it is true, yet so much aliice as frequently to be mistaken the one for the other. The origin of both is found in the kind of social thought, of psychological interaction, which is present. Liberty is knowledge entered upon a further phase, an active phase of evolution. Despotism, on the other hand, is a degree of knowledge so inferior that we term it ignorance. But it does not seem an unjust yoke, oppressive and intolerable, except to those who possess a knowledge more extended and more profound ; that it to say, to those who retain a force, a superorganic power more great. But when revolt occurs, the liberator of today becomes the despot of tomorrow, for the men of tomorrow will have increased in knowledge. Knowledge and liberty are thus the obverse and the reverse of one and the same social fact. Knowledge and all that has been said applies to philosophy and art as well is an accumulated and latent liberty, and liberty is a science, a philosophy, an aesthetics become active and putting forth external effort. Tolerant, neutral, laissez-faire con- temporaries have no right to fashion and model a metaphysical concept of absolute liberty upon the temporary and exceptional situation in which social knowledge and its technical applications find themselves today. For such a dogma will certainly have to be abandoned when sociology has made an important advance. EUGENE DE ROBERTY, "Le concept sociologique de liberte," in Revue philosophique, November, 1903. E. B. W.

Negro Education in the South. In spite of forty years of freedom, the negro who loves so well to " travel on the cars " is still in the South, and is there from choice The South is both debtor and creditor to the negro ; debtor for the surpassing loyalty so strongly shown in the dark days of the Civil War, and creditor by virtue of the fact that the South in a century and a half enabled the negro to make more progress from savagery to civilization than any free barbarous people ever achieved in so short a time. Slavery was the first chapter in the history of negro education.

The second chapter is a record of reconstruction blunders committed upon the theory that what the negro needed, and practically all that he needed, was the education of books. The results were at once disappointing and grotesque. The problem has now been largely remanded to the justice and even the tenderness of the South itself. The South has repudiated and will repudiate the suggestion