Page:Philosophical Review Volume 4.djvu/99

83 and directs a body falling to the earth" (p. 32). He confesses that there is "no science of human society properly so called" (p. 1), that "the larger part of the most useful work of the century in the department of sociology appears to have been merely destructive" (p. 5, note), and apparently believes that this must be corrected by the application of biological methods and conclusions to social science. The concepts with which he deals are in many instances transferred from the sciences of plant and brute life and applied without modification or qualification to human and social life. Perhaps no concept appears more frequently in his pages than that of struggle or competition, and this is constantly presented as a struggle between individuals, nations, or races, never as a struggle between social forms, ideas, or institutions. Social progress is marked by the "exterminated peoples" (pp. 46, 66), not the exterminated ideas left beside its path. The "two great features of this century" are "the triumph of the principles of the French Revolution" and "the equally triumphant expansion of the peoples of Teutonic stock" (p. 278). Here we see the two forms of struggle spoken of side by side, but our author concludes without argument that the latter is the only expansion of importance, and that it brings "the ascendancy which the Teutonic peoples have won and are winning in the world " (p. 283). How far is the present social influence of the ancient Athenians connected with the number of living persons who have any of that blood in their veins? Did the ancient Jews serve the world by transmitting their race characteristics to their modern representatives more efficiently than they did by supplying the environment from which Christianity sprang? It results from our author's purely biological conception of struggle that he regards the slight increase of numbers among the French as a "striking history of racial self-effacement" (p. 280). From beginning to end of his work there is not a single mention of the social force of imitation, a force, however, probably more powerful and far-reaching than any with which he deals. Judged from the standpoint of social science, the argument of the book must be regarded as inconclusive, because it over-emphasizes the resemblances and neglects the differences between social phenomena and purely biological phenomena. The main object of the book is indicated in the last sentence of the following passage. It is realized "that religion … is a factor of some kind in the social evolution which is in progress. But as to what that function is, where it begins, where it ends, and what