SCIENCE IN PHILANTHROPY 41 



basis of sociology, often without thinking of his scheme of Ufe 

 under this somewhat novel title. 



When a community distinguishes classes of abnormal 

 men, it tacitly acts with a standard of normal men and normal 

 society before its mind. When a people, ])y legal means or 

 by voluntary associations, constructs a system of institutions 

 for the care of its abnormal mem])ers, it acts upon a theory 

 of the objects of society and the normal order of its arrange- 

 ments. This practical coordination of the special knowledge 

 of economists, lawyers, physicians, educators, is a necessity 

 of life. Sociologists are simply struggling to make this coor- 

 dination as adequate as possible. A special science out of 

 relations to a general theory of society is as helpless and futile 

 as the mainspring of a watch lying in isolated abstraction 

 outside the watch itself. 



Compare the methods of dealing with prisoners in the 

 more advanced reformatories with that employed in back- 

 ward communities, where the antiquated philosophy of vin- 

 dictive justice dominates both law and discipline, and per- 

 petuates the passions of lynching, feuds and murder. Modem 

 criminology marks off, with increasing accuracy, the various 

 classes of prisoners — criminals of passion, occasional criminals, 

 habitual criminals, and those congenitally defective persons 

 who should be in custodial asylums for imbeciles rather than 

 in prisons. Criminologists lay stress upon the characters 

 and capabilities of men; the traditionahsts persist in relying 

 on definitions of acts, and in seeking to measure exact guilt 

 in terms of time. Science deals with knowable qualities; 

 tradition and popular passion grope for a standard of the un- 

 knowable. 



We have already a few reformatory prisons in which the 

 more advanced methods of education are employed with hope- 

 ful results. A visit to one of these institutions for reformation, 

 with its splendid equipment for regenerating the dwarfed and 

 perverted offender in body, mind, and spirit, awakens ad- 

 miration. But instantly the question starts in the mind: 

 Why not use these appliances of education in advance of crime? 

 Why not give our public schools the means of preventing the 

 germination and formation of the anti social habit? 



