Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/222

206 is true, is not his alone. How the human ego arrives, whether mediately or immediately, must be forever a mystery, as how the finite comes from the Infinite.

The author defines the soul as a system of sentient symbols. "Man's thoughts are sentient images of the things and relations of the objective world, and thinking is simply a combining of these sentient images." This seems but a penurious account of all man's thoughts, which wander through eternity and build the systems of science and philosophy and create all the opulence of poetry and art. Dr. Carus remarks: "The soul is not that which feels and thinks and acts, but is the feeling itself, the thinking itself, and the acting itself." Is there, then, thinking without a thinker, acting without an agent, feeling without a subject who feels? He says, however, in another place, "Every subject feels its own feelings" (not those of another subject). He, however, concludes: "There is no metaphysical unity in an ego ... which would be a continuous unifying power." The personal soul is then only disjecta membra. The author speaks of God as superpersonal, in order to escape anthropomorphism. But to be superpersonal is to be less than personal, since personality is the hightest conception of being. Rather should we say with Lotze, "Perfect personality is God." The study of the material world and of the phenomena of life, more and more relieve the problems of Whence and Whither, and attempts to find in the cosmic process and the essence of matter, confirmations of reason and feeling are far from being unfruitful. The passage from the subjective side of the material world to the subjectivity of the personal soul does not here seem to be clearly indicated, nor is the soul apprehended as unity or as subject.

"The object of this book is to present a scheme of inductive method, a somewhat detailed analysis and classification of social facts, and a tentative formulation of the more obvious laws of social activity, all as a basis for further inductive studies" (p. ix). The study of sociology, which has claimed so much attention during the last decade, has constantly been criticized, on the one hand, because it dealt with generalizations insufficiently established instead of concrete facts; or on the other hand, because it was concerned with data which properly belonged to some already existing branch of study. That there are social facts which can be studied accurately, and which have not been satisfactorily studied by any other science, has always been claimed by Professor Giddings; still we turn to the present volume in the hope of finding a better proof of this position than was afforded by his previous works.

The idea of a book which shall guide the student in the study of