Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 74.djvu/18

14 which it is adequately linked, it seems isolated and solitary. The failure clearly to affiliate mind upon life is not its worst fault. From the standpoint of the sociologist the most glaring defect is the absence of all recognition of the psychologic basis of social phenomena. Neither in the "Psychology" nor in the "Sociology" which follows is there to be found any attempt to show what are the underlying causes of social phenomena. The nature of social energy which moves the world is nowhere set forth, the distinct rôles played by feeling and thought, as the motor and rector agencies of both the individual and society are not recognized, and both psychology and sociology are thus reduced to mere descriptive sciences. Much the same may be said of his failure to recognize a vital energy in biology with motility as the dynamic agent, which also leaves biology in the descriptive stage. Life and mind are forces, and organic, psychic and social structures are magazines of energy. Any system that fails to recognize this is not a full-fledged science.

It may be said that Spencer constantly insisted that it was feeling and not ideas that moved the world, as opposed to Comte's statement that ideas govern or overthrow the world. It is clear that he misunderstood Comte, who held the same view as Spencer, and that the two statements are not antagonistic. Spencer also said that "the will is a product of predominant desires to which the reason serves merely as an eye." This is very true, and Schopenhauer had said it forty years before him. But such scintillations of the truth do not make a science nor justify us in saying that he thereby furnished sociology with a psychologic basis.

Coming now to the "Principles of Sociology," we find that the work was not hampered by any previous work, and, as in the "Biology," the field was clear for a new start in a most alluring direction. If the order in which the volumes of the "SynthelicSynthetic [sic] Philosophy "stand is the order of nature, marking the course of evolution, we should expect to find the "Sociology" opening with a chapter or an introductory part setting forth the causal connection between sociology and psychology. But, just as no causal connection was shown between biology and psychology, so none appears binding psychology and sociology together. This confirms what was said of the isolated condition of the "Principles of Psychology." What we do find, however, is a rather definite intimation that it is biology rather than psychology that forms the natural basis of sociology. How could any one be expected to doubt this when nothing is said in the first volume of the "Sociology" about its relation to psychology, while, after the long treatise on the beliefs,