sponding changes in the character of the products" (p. 174). "All forces are essentially alike, and the life force or growth force is like any other physical force. That is, it always obeys the first law of motion and causes motion in a straight line unless deflected by another force" (p. 178). "Science . . . . teaches the spirituality of matter" (p. 379). "The deeper we penetrate the secrets of nature, the less do the mechanical, material, and physical processes seem to differ from psychic and spiritual processes, and all will ultimately prove to be the same" (p. 454). Now, what intelligible notion can be gotten from these conflicting statements? The spiritual (psychical and social) forces are all primarily physical in their nature, like physical forces obeying the laws of motion, yet they are new forces called in to supplement the original forces of matter and life. The mere phrase "creative synthesis" does not clear up contradictions such as these. He says that these forces will all ultimately prove to be the same, but he offers no hypothesis. which might make this statement intelligible. The difficulty of the apparent contradiction of the law of conservation of energy he passes over with the remark that "the conservation of energy and correlation of forces are as applicable to psychic and social forces as to physical forces" (p. 99). Let us turn to another psychological conception. He says that feeling is prior to cognition. "The feelings had, moreover, a much earlier origin than the intellect, so that during a prolonged period they constituted the only psychic manifestations, and do so still throughout practically the entire animal world" (p. 101). A psychologist, reading this, naturally wonders whether this statement means what, upon the surface, it appears to mean. If feeling is a dynamic force, and intellect is not a force, but only a telic or directive agent, one might raise the question whether the question of priority could have any significance at all in the case of two such wholly different things. If both could be brought into the same category, either as forces or as telic agents, then the question of priority might be intelligible, and has, of course, often been raised and discussed by psychologists. Feeling, he says, is "the subjective department of mind, the phenomena being wholly subjective or relating to the organism, and never objective or relating to the external world" (p. 102). It is "subjective subjectivity" (p. 128). How this can be reconciled with the statement that feeling is a physical force he does not explain. "One of its inherent qualities," he says, "is that of seeking an end" (p. 102). It is conative, appetitive, and "appetition is a motive and impels to action" (p. 102). Now, if feeling acts as a motive, it would seem as though there must be intellect there. If there is no cognitive side to it, it can be only motor, propulsive. He meets this by saying that "motive" here means mobile, not motif. He insists that the psychic (feeling) can be without being recognized as such (intellect). But is not this being recognized as such the very essence of the psychic? If there is no consciousness of the process, how does this "motive" differ from any other movement-from a tropism, for example ? Again, he says, "action is certain to follow the motive, unless prevented by some physical obstacle or by other motives that antagonize it and produce a state of psychic equilibrium." But such antagonism of motives leading to psychic equilibrium is the very essence of what we mean by the cognitive the tension of means and ends, of motives. He says that feeling takes the form of appetition and desire. "It not only consists of an awareness of self, but of an awareness of some need" (p. 102). Now, what is this but cognition? In so far as this is not simply a consciousness of need or lack in general (a form which. consciousness never takes in the lower forms at least), it is consciousness of some specific need, and this specification is cognitive. The fallacy of making feeling prior in the evolution of consciousness has been exposed so often in psychological controversy that one hesitates to devote much space to a new example of the error. But consider one more instance. On a later page he says: "Although feeling is a conscious state, still there is no consciousness, at least in the lower stages of development, of the relation of feeling to function. The conscious creature is conscious only of its own states. It is not conscious of the functional effect of its actions in response to those states" (p. 126). "It subserves function but not for the sake of function" (p. 128). Here we have the reductio ad absurdum of this notion. Of what "states" could any creature be conscious if not states of the "relation of feeling to function"? That is all any consciousness consists of feelings, sensations, and these in relation to "its actions in response." If feeling came into existence as a means to the performance of function, as the author insists, then that means must have been means to some end: a means apart from an end to which it is a means is not truly a means. There must have been some "foresight," however vague, if there was any feeling whatever, for otherwise there would be no significance in the appearance of the feeling. Bare or mere or pure feeling is an abstraction of the psychologist. The difficulties grow only greater when we come to his statements concerning the relation of feeling to thought. While feeling remains a force, thought, which, according to his own theory, is evolved from feeling, is pronounced to be, not a force, but a relation. "There is no transition possible from feeling to thought. . . . . The distinction is generic, and there are no intermediate stages or gradations from the one to the other. . . . . They are phenomena of entirely different orders and do not admit of comparison . . . since while one is in a sense measurable, being a force, the other is wholly incommensurable, being a relation" (p. 457). What has become of our scientific principle of continuity? And what sort of a psychology is it that evolves relations out of forces, the incommensurable out of the measurable! We find the same confusion and contradiction in his conception of the relation of structure and function. "The function is the end for which a mechanism is constructed" (p. 180). "The structures are only the means. Function is the end" (p. 181). This is pre-eminently true, but we then are startled with the statement that function is static because structure is static. "All considerations of structure being static, it is evident that all considerations of function must also be statical" (p. 181). "Function, simply as such, has no effect whatever in modifying structure" (p. 181). Biologists today, I suppose, will grant that function does not modify structure; it is not a vera causa. But, on the other hand, will they not say that function is structure undergoing modification? A really static structure is a mechanism, not an organism, or, at least, it is an inert (relatively speaking) mechanism, not an operating mechanism. He says that "the process by which structures are produced is not a dynamic process" (p. 222). "Dynamic movements are confined to structures already formed and, as stated, consist in changes in the type of these structures." At what point can it be said that structures are "already formed"? All functioning is change of structure, and it is impossible to draw a line and say where this becomes a change in the "type" of structure. He himself asserts that this change of type "takes place by infinitesimal increments" (p. 222), and he calls attention to the fact that "in biology it has now been learned that species are not fixed but variable, and that there has been a perpetual transmutation of species" (p. 224). How, then, can he speak of any living structure as static? This is the characteristic of all life, of all growth. Without recognizing it, he has himself supplied the key to his own difficulty when he says, in another place, that the science of social statics" assumes the fixity of human institutions in order to study them, abstracts for the moment the idea of movement or change, and deals with society at a given point of time. It takes, as it were, an instantaneous photograph" (p. 224). How, then, can he make such statements as have been quoted above, if this static character is a mere methodological abstraction and not the real fact concerning the phenomena? If social statics represents this abstraction, then social statics should rest on social dynamics, and not the reverse, as he contends. An application of this point of view would save him also from the very great difficulties which he unnecessarily creates for himself by his arbitrary separation of biological function, individual feeling, and social action (or achievement). It would prevent his artificial separation of means and ends, of dynaınic force and directive agent. What he calls telesis must have been present from the first in what he calls genesis. Finally, we come to what is in some respects the most important psychological conception in the book, because of its relations to sociology that of the place of the psychical individual in social achievement. The fundamental law is that in organic evolution the environment transforms the organism, whereas in the socialization of achievement man transforms the environment (p. 254). The medium of this transformation is mind, consciousness, reason, the psychic. The instrument of progress is strictly individualistic (p. 545). "Social genesis is secured through individual telesis" (p. 545). "The initiative is almost exclusively individual and the ends sought are egocentric. The social consequences are . . . . unconscious." The really social nature of individual consciousness and the important function of the individual in the reconstruction of (social) experience are vaguely assumed throughout the book. This is perhaps the most important question at the present time in both psychology and sociology — the relation between the social process of evolution as a whole and the psychic process which takes place in the individual consciousness. In certain passages this function of the individual in the reorganization of social experience is worked out in a very suggestive way. Yet here, too, an inadequate psychology precludes any satisfactory statement of the principle. "The phenomenon is psychic" (p. 243). This is the peculiar function of the "directive agent," of "telesis." An example is found in the inventive genius. "What the inventor does is to discover the principle. . . . . This discovery, and not the resulting material product, is the lasting element in the operation" (p. 29). The author would even have a technique of invention and discovery. He deplores the fact that there is "no recognition of invention as a discipline" and "no text-book . . . . on invention in general" (p. 495). The biological homologue is the "sport" (p. 240). His own term is "social innovation," which he prefers to "invention" (Tarde), "impulse" (Patten), "instinct of workmanship" (Veblen), etc. He enumerates the following sources of innovation : In the first place, he mentions caste, slavery, and other sources of inequalities among men giving rise to a leisure class as an important instance of the principle of innovation. The conquering race became the leisure class. Other influences, especially the sacerdotal, contributed to the same end. Individuals of this leisure class became responsible to a great extent for social innovations. The author curiously traces this impulse to the attempt to escape ennui. Moreover, with the beginning of settled community life and the indvidual, instead of the communal, possession of property, the individual tends more and more to be the medium of social progress. Only relatively late in social evolution can the individual be said to have become the instrument of social advance, and it is not wholly true now. The social forces are still predominantly unconscious and generic rather than reflective and individual. But the rise of reflective thought, the bringing to consciousness of the method or technique of social action, which, of course, could only take place in the consciousness of individuals, i. e., only in the psychical sphere, has brought the psychic individual into the foreground as the chief instrumentality from now on through which social achievement will be won. The spheres of romantic and conjugal love are ranked high in the scale of social innovations, as also the so-called anti-social emotions of jealousy and revenge. The spiritual forces are the only positively socializing forces because they alone are egoistic, psychic; they alone are truly sociogenetic. VASSAR College. H. HEATH BAWDEN. Le problème du déterminisme social: Déterminisme biologique et RECOGNIZING the necessity of a demonstrated theory of social determinism as the basis of social science, the author of this book |