704 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XV. No. 383. 



understand the pliysiological, ps.ychological, 

 emotional, and moral composition of individ- 

 uals. On the other hand, we shall never fully 

 understand these elements until we entirely 

 comprehend the social reactions in the course 

 of which these elements are evolved. Mean- 

 while it is the fond folly of the philosophic 

 temper to invert values, and plan to learn 

 most about the thing that interests us most 

 by neglecting it and studying most the thing 

 that interests us least. It is not less fatuous 

 because, forsooth, there is an ultimate inter- 

 dependence between these objects of less and 

 greater interest. Such reversal of a practical 

 order amounts to a confession of unfaith in 

 one's own appropriate scientific mission, and 

 in that of others as well. Cannot other schol- 

 ars be trusted to do their own work better 

 than we can do it for them, and have we noth- 

 ing to do which others have not fitted them- 

 selves to do as well? The strictly sociological 

 questions center around ihe fortunes of men 

 in association. The strictly physiological and 

 psychological questions center around the 

 mahe-up of the persons associating. Either of 

 these groups of problems is a perfectly legiti- 

 mate sphere of scientific interest. Neither of 

 them is an exclusive sphere. Each runs into 

 the other. It is, however, forsaking specializa- 

 tion for amateurism if the men whose center 

 of interest is in the social sphere give their 

 time to exploiting hypotheses in the individual 

 sphere, and vice versa. As Professor Giddings 

 assumes, in abundant and striking examples, 

 in the chapter on concerted volition, the typ- 

 ical sociological questions are: How do men 

 associate? For what purposes do they asso- 

 ciate? How do they come to change the types 

 of their associations? What are the reactions 

 of the different types of associations upon the 

 persons associating, and of the persons asso- 

 ciating upon the different types of associa- 

 tions? Our answers to these questions will 

 be false if we cut loose from the involved facts 

 centering in the individual; but knowledge of 

 these two phases of the common reality will 

 have to grow through persistent use of the 

 distinct centers of attention, not by abandon- 

 ment of the one for the other. 



For the sociologist to try to be at the same 



time a successful ethnologist and a laboratory 

 psychologist, in the hope of building up social 

 facts from the elements, is hardly less naive 

 than the program which has been adopted and 

 abandoned in disgust so many times by over- 

 conscientious historians. They have decided 

 to go back and find a point which they might 

 take as absolute beginning of the evolution 

 which they wanted to trace, and they have re- 

 solved from that point to clean up everything 

 as they went along, leaving no unfilled gaps, 

 and no unattached material. In practice they 

 have been obliged to choose between forever 

 pushing backward in search for the origin of 

 the origins, or starting somewhere and tracing 

 certain series of apparent evolutions, neglect- 

 ing many factors that are doubtless concerned 

 in the evolution, in order to be free to con- 

 sider any series at all. 



In actual experience, as contributors to 

 knowledge rather than as middle-men, we 

 must virtually choose in the same way, between 

 physiology and psychology on the one hand 

 and sociology on the other. Neither division 

 of labor is going to succeed in cleaning up 

 everything as it goes. Psychology will at one 

 stage limp because it lacks support in sociol- 

 ogy, and again sociology will be top-heavy 

 because its center of gravity is not down close 

 enough to psychology; but science will pro- 

 gress best if the sociologist sticks to sociology, 

 and takes his psychology from the psycholo- 

 gists, instead of trying to be his own psycholo- 

 gist; and vice versa. 



Professor Giddings is attempting to inter- 

 pret society in terms of that abstraction which 

 we called 'the individual' before we realized 

 that it was an abstraction. This, I think, ac- 

 counts for the fact which Professor Ross 

 points out in a highly appreciative review of 

 'Inductive Sociology' {Am. Jour, of Social., 

 January, 1902), viz., that the title of Book 

 TI., Part II., Chap. II., 'Mental and Practical 

 Resemblance,' is a misnomer. The chapter is 

 a most sagacious qualitative analysis of indi- 

 vidual traits, and a formal determination of 

 types marked by the traits. Apparently, how- 

 ever. Professor Giddings' thought is in this 

 form: "These traits in the individual. A, re- 

 semble the traits in the individuals B, C and 



