assumes the task of proving the reality of social as distinguished from biological determinism and of setting forth the relations between the two. After passing in review the theories of Spencer, Novicow, Ammon, and others who deny social determinism, and culling from such writers as Huxley, Durkheim, Ward, and others evidences of disagreement with them, he presents a theory of his own which attaches social to biological determinism, and asserts the superiority of the former. His theory, in short, is this: Biological determinism is supreme in all vital phenomena, or in all the region of life below the advent of mind. Mind is derived exclusively from the relations which are formed between individuals living in an organized and evolving society. Intellect and consciousness are not products of the physiological cell or of relations between cells, but of the relations between individuals as social units. Man, the possessor of mind, loses under the influence of a changing environment the power to transmit physiologically the qualities acquired under these conditions, and this function is performed by social heredity. The essential characteristic of the social fact is its non-inheritance; as assimilation and consequent heredity are the quid proprium of the vital. All is social which is not physiologically transmissible. Physiological heredity, being a consequence of the rigidity of the cosmic environment, is progressively neutralized on account of the mobility and increasing complexity of the social environment. Instinct, which is a product of physiological heredity, is altered, disorganized, and finally gives way to reason, the product of social heredity, and the agent of social determinism. The opposition of social and biological determinism is paralleled, then, by the opposition of social and biological heredity, and of instinct and reason. Intelligence, consciousness, and reason are the products of the social environment. These, however, are employed to modify the environment, which, in turn, reacts upon the plastic organism. Thus the laws of biology become subject to the laws of mind; natural selection is made to give place to justice, the spontaneous to the conscious, natural inequality to ethico-social equality. True social laws, therefore, lie not behind us imbedded in social history, but in the enlightened reason of men. They are the legal enactments which all reflecting men will voluntarily obey.

Such, in brief, is the theory which M. Draghicesco presents. He is in error in supposing that he is the first to state the problem of of social determinism in such a way as to make it the counterpart of biological determinism, or that his main thesis is new. The central

idea and the practical consequences of his theory were anticipated in this country by some twenty years. Although he includes Professor Lester F. Ward among those who have been vaguely conscious of the reality of social determinism and its opposition to biological determinism, citing his Outlines of Sociology and an article or two by the same writer, he does not seem to be aware that the American sociologist has anticipated him upon almost every point he has discussed. The first chapter of Professor Ward's Dynamic Sociology (1883) and more particularly his Psychic Factors of Civilization (1901), to say nothing of his more recent work on Pure Sociology, make the task assumed by M. Draghicesco all but superfluous.

To have been anticipated, however, does not necessarily detract from the merit of a thinker, and discriminating readers will readily acknowledge the scholarship and logical force manifested in the present work.

Authors as a rule are liable to blunder in spelling the names of foreign writers. It may be worth while to point out that among the names misspelled in this volume are those of Lester F. Ward (p. 16), Lloyd Morgan (p. 39), and Büchner (p. 89).

IRA W. HOWERTH.

Conquering Success; or, Life in Earnest. By WILLIAM MATHEWS. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Pp. viii+404. $1.50.

WHILE Sociology is in the making, and while there are quack prescriptions galore for every social ill, it is a relief to greet occasionally a book which does not claim to be scientific, but which is full of safe pointers about the conduct of life. In his best-known work, Getting on in the World, Dr. Mathews has done more than one man's share to start a generation of young men with high conceptions of life. The cases known to me in which the book was the turning-point in a boy's career are proofs that it is a salutary moral force. The present volume was perhaps written in a less ardent tone of feeling, but the readers for whom it is intended will hardly detect the difference. It is the kind of book that ought to be on the list of supplementary reading in every high school.

A. W. S.

NOTES AND ABSTRACTS.

The Elements and Evolution of Morality.— How can one know his duty in the extraordinary confusion of moral ideas which characterizes our time? Are patriotism, the family, private property, tolerance, to be praised or condemned? In the presence of these and many other such problems, conscience hesitates and is troubled, and skepticism increases. This uncertainty of practice has its principal cause in the confusion and anarchy which prevail in the realm of speculative morals. There is increasing, and on the whole, commendable, effort to find a scientific basis for morals. There has certainly been some progress: the old theological problem of the nature of absolute good is nearly abandoned; morality appears as a fact, as a natural fact, which is to be determined, not from a priori conditions, but from a study of origins and development - a problem capable of being solved solely by means of experimental method.

But this fact, instead of being taken in its entirety as it is given by experience, has been mutilated and misapplied at pleasure to suit the needs of some gratuitous hypotheses. This is a fault from which the moralists of the sociological school have not escaped, not even Herbert Spencer.

The sociologists declare that morality, a natural fact, is at the same time a social fact. They certainly would be correct if by that they meant only that morality has been built up only through the existence of society, of which it is in some measure a product; and that moral progress is intimately bound up with social progress (that it conditions social progress, so to speak, as much as social progress conditions the moral progress). But they are far from the truth when they seem to identify morality with sociality, moral progress with progress in social organization. This identification is based upon the general analogy between societies and organisms. As through evolution in the animal series we come to consciousness in the individual, so, according to the analogy, we reach a sort of social consciousness in society. According to the sociologists, morality is only sociality, the product of a social sense, belonging entirely to the sentiment of solidarity; and moral progress is only the internal or subjective side of the progress in social organization. Individual morality is snuffed out or, at least, entirely subordinated to social morality in which it has its source. Such is the doctrine the sociologists present to us as a true and adequate expression of the facts. I do not wish to take time to point out the danger to practice and to education in identitying the moral with the vague notion of solidarity. But is it a fact that individual morals have their principle and source in social morals? Does not the history of mankind show, on the contrary, that the desire of personal perfection may be entirely independent of all incentive from the social order? Does it not teach that progress in individual morals has often been in advance of, and prepared the way for, progress in social morals, as is seen in the typical case of Buddhism and later in Stoicism preceded by ascetic practices bridling selfish desires, and cultivating the principles of charity and universal benevolence? Is the sociologists' theory true to experience or is it as like to a metaphysical entity as is the pretended social sense? For my part I see in the unquestionable development of solidarity only a double progress in the order of sensibility and of intelligence which amounts to a more and more comprehensive sympathy, and a more and more exact conception of social relations. But, further, the biological analogy on which the sociologists' theory of morals rests has been shown not to hold. Sociology finds before it a multitude of facts of a special order, having their common condition in the existence of man in society, and that can be called social facts; such are economic, political, scientific, æsthetic, religious, and moral facts. These facts, differing widely, sociology should observe in their relations, should

show the connection between them; but it has confused them, making their study almost impossible. Morality, as an art or a science, ought to be distinguished carefully from the social organization which it conditions, at least as much as it is conditioned by it. Social progress is one thing, and moral progress is another, quite as much as is scientific progress, or æsthetic progress. These latter certainly should be studied by themselves and separately, in spite of the manifest connection which they have with social progress; and it is the same with moral progress.

But if sociologists have put too much confidence in the biological analogy, and have succeeded in scarcely more than confusing the facts, they certainly have helped to make clear the method of ethics. It can be only the genetic method.

Morality being considered as a natural fact in process of evolution, the fundamental problem is to determine the origin and development of the fact. To do this it is first of all important to isolate it, to distinguish it carefully from the many and accompanying facts with which it is connected, and especially from the social organization with which for the most part the sociologists tend to confound it. Difficult though it is to trace the evolution of morality through its successive stages, it is not impossible, for the essential thing in morality is the moral ideal, that is, the conception that men have had of the Good (Bien) through the world and in the successive periods of history. In such a historical study of the moral ideal two factors are seen always to have concurred in its formation: these are intelligence and sensibility. Moral progress may be regarded as a function of these two. But among peoples as among individuals, intelligence and sensibility do not keep pace in development, and in this variation we have the raison d'être of the many variations so evident in morality. Taking things in the large, this double progress is followed, with a pace more or less irregular, agreeing with the general course of civilization, which it conditions at the same time that it is conditioned in turn by it, in such a way that moral progress, which is a function of this double progress, may be considered as having the measure in the progress of civilization, and its actual goal in the moral ideal as conceived by the most advanced nations of modern Europe.

In the analysis of the moral ideal are found three elements: one of the æsthetic order; one of the logical or rational order; and one of the sympathetic or altruistic order. In individual perfection there must be courage, temperance, and wisdom; or, in other words, grandeur, proportion, and order. But these are terms of the aesthetic appreciation. In wisdom the logical element of the moral ideal is already implied, but in justice it is the chief factor. Sympathy includes such as alms-giving, assistance in time of suffering, a feeling of solidarity, and is far more stable than mere community of utility.

The æsthetic, rational, and sympathetic elements of morality are found in varying proportions in systems of culture and in individual lives. In Buddhistic India the sympathetic, in Greece the aesthetic, in Rome the rational, element was especially pronounced. Corresponding differences in individuals are too evident to need mention. It is well known also that either of these given elements is judged, not as a thing isolated, but as combined with the other elements and as functioning in the situation. To the artist beauty, to the humanist sympathy, to the jurist justice, becomes the dominating element in morality. In the many combinations possible by the rearrangement among these three elements and their several degrees of emphasis, are to be found all the various forms of obligation from the impulse to relieve suffering, to remorse, and to Kant's categorical imperative.

The above analysis of the moral ideal into its three elements makes the study of its development quite simple in method, consisting of a study of the evolution of each of the elements. We shall take up first the evolution of the æsthetic element.

If primitive cultures have sought the colossal and the monstrous (extensive magnitude), savages have been charmed by brightness of color and intensity of sound (intensive magnitude). Animals, too, are not insensible to such qualities. To the peacock, beauty of plumage is virtue; to the nightingale, splendor of voice is virtue; to the primitive man, size and strength are virtue. This same admira

tion of physical power has remained quite pronounced. It was strikingly characteristic of the heroes in Homer's poems and of the Greek gods. A little later in the æsthetic history of Greece the element of symmetry, of proportion, came to have a recognized and important place in the ideal. Later still, to strength, magnitude, and symmetry, as objective factors, were added the subjective factors of courage and cunning. The latter was not long after ruled out of the aesthetic ideal. The point we desire to call attention to here is that the ruling out of cunning was due, not to the recognition of its social disutility, but to the feeling of its contradiction with the elements of courage, size, and strength; and it should be noted, further, that the elements of magnitude and strength have not been chosen on account of their social value.

But ere craftiness had fallen so completely in disfavor, it had given birth to prudence and moderation, through its union with courage. The later æsthetic ideal, especially in some civilizations as in Brahmanism, has consisted chiefly of the passive and subjective virtues. The continued evolution of the æsthetico-moral element has been, in spite of some arrests and regressions, gradually away from the objective to the subjctive, as in Buddhism and Stoicism, and as in the philosophy of Descartes and of Kant. But the æsthetico-moral ideal should include in a comprehensive synthesis of courage and force of mind, of moderation and temperance, of intelligence and science, also strength, health and beauty of body, the harmony of which last three gives, in a certain measure, an internal harmony. Such is the conception of morality that seems to be gaining recognition.- M. MAUXION, "Les éléments et l'évolution de la moralité," in Revue philosophique, July, 1903. [To be continued.] T. J. R.

The Nature of Morality.—The sentiment of approbation or disapprobation which inspires such and such conduct is the starting-point of moral value. Any judgment assumes some standard. The moral law, like the civil law, may be defined as the expression of the general will. In any group there is a general spirit (âme) consisting of the traditional beliefs and ways of acting, common sentiment and accepted evaluations, general precepts and formulas of conduct, reasonings familiar to all, judgments of conventionality, etc. Such might be put under the general head of customs (mæurs). But not all that conforms to custom is moral. Only the observation or violation of customs expressly imposed and sanctioned by the public will have moral value. The moral may be defined as the body of customs formulated in prohibitions and precepts (défenses et prescriptions) having an expressly coercive sanction and imposed by the public will of a group. The ideas of the moral expressing the exigencies of the collective will necessarily vary; also the class of facts to which importance in morals attaches changes with the times and conditions. The altruistic sentiment," says Durkheim, "presents the moral character in a manner most marked, but there was a time, not long ago, when the religious, domestic, and a thousand other traditional sentiments had exactly the same effect; " but at present we see no other criterion of moral value than the collective will (volonté collective).

Individual morality is the estimation of the acts of the individual by the public eye. Moral conscience is only a secondary fact, is only the echo of the judgments and precepts of social morality. The morality of the individual then, as his religion and his language, changes with that of the group, of the race, and of the epoch to which he belongs. The welfare of the group is the origin and external sanction of morality. Acting for the welfare of the group becomes organized back into the individual and his moral conscience, but reflects the demands of the exterior sanction. The action of the individual may have an affective element, varying according to the vitalness of the occasion and the degree of habituation. Acting in a way that is moral agreeing with the external restraint and therefore with the moral conscience of the individual may become so habitual as to be unconscious. Such action is automatic and non-moral, though not immoral. This "downward drift," this putting moral acts into the habitual, frees more energy for the performance of new moral acts. This, together with the inheritance of moral dispositions, in the same way as temperaments are inherited, is the possibility of moral progress.