Page:War and Other Essays.djvu/30

Rh industry and vigor had not lessened; we used to believe that if Spencer had had such a collection of materials, the Principles of Sociology would have been far more strongly buttressed, and would more nearly have resembled the irresistible Origin of Species. Equipped linguistically, as I shall later describe, for the collection of materials, he had plunged into the field marked off by Tylor, Lubbock, Spencer, and others, and had read an incredible number of books, journals, and other sources. The first public indication of this research, and of his long reflection upon its results, was the appearance, in 1907, of Folkways, a Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals. I cannot go into this publication except to say (as bearing upon what immediately precedes) that it has astonished scholars by the range of its survey over a field to which the author had been able to give exclusive attention for so comparatively short a time. The bibliography of this book covers fifteen closely printed pages, and yet includes scarcely any titles of systematic works, and practically no references to the author's extensive economic reading. To his fellow-scientists Folkways revealed the fact that Sumner's scholarly labors, under conditions of ill-health and of declining strength, had in later years even surpassed those of his prime. Further, and more important, it is thought by many that Folkways represents a fundamental step in the development of any sound science of society. Sumner used to say that he had found, in the conception of the mores, "either a gold-mine or a big hole in the ground," and that it must be left to the future to determine which.

To understand the bearing of this book on the treatise covering the science of society (of which, in the preface to the Folkways, Professor Sumner speaks as his next task), one must realize that the idea of the "folkways" or "mores "was one which he came to regard as entirely fundamental to any scientific system of sociology. He had written for five years, more or less, on his projected general treatise on the Science of Society before he came to what he called the "section on the mores"; this section it was which developed, under the title