THE AMERICAN SOCIOLOGIST OF THE TWEN= 

 TIETH CENTURY. 



BY MICHAEL A. LANE. 



[Michael A, Lane was born at St. Louis in 1867; educated in the classics at the Uni- 

 versity of St. Louis ; studied theoretical biology privately ; studied practical anatomy 

 and physiology at the University of Illinois, and, later, practical histology and neurol- 

 ogy at the ITniversity of Chicago; worked for eight years to identify the facts of social 

 evolution in man and lower animals with the law of natural selection; published his 

 thexjry in a work entitled "The Level of Social Motion" in 1902; contributor to 

 American magazines, 1S93 to 1905.] 



Madame de Stael, in her criticism of the manners and 

 morals of the Germans, shrewdly observed the causes under- 

 lying the very rapid progress of science in Germany, by noting 

 that the Prussian state, while discouraging political liberty, 

 had always been forward in encouraging intellectual liberty. 

 Free speech, indeed, has been ever the prerogative of the Ger- 

 man man of science, and wherever free speech has flourished 

 intellectual progress has been rapid. 



There is, however, in the peculiarly rapid development 

 of science in Germany, something more than this German 

 tradition of free speech, and it is upon this significant fact that 

 I wish to touch before speaking of the American scholar. 



In Germany there is found a state of affairs not altogether 

 unlike that of ancient Athens, when the philosopher was the 

 most honored of all men. I will venture the assertion that 

 in Germany, during the past century and more, not even 

 royalty itself has been more honored than the eminent scholar. 

 Scholarship is the ideal of the German family, as the ministry 

 is the ideal of the Scotch family. To the idealistic mind of 

 Fichte scholarship was something above merely human, 

 worldly things, and the life of the scholar was a high manifesta- 

 tion of the divine idea. In a people, which, more than a 

 century ago, could produce a man with notions as inflamed 

 as this, there is something that is quite beyond the compre- 

 hension of utility — a something that is very difficult for the 

 popular mind in America to understand. 



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