LESTER F. WARD AS SOCIOLOGIST 97 



LESTEE F. WABD AS SOCIOLOGIST 



By Peofessoe E. A. ROSS 



UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN 



THE late Lester F. Ward was a many-sided man and his fifty pro- 

 ductive years brought forth a great number of contributions to 

 botan} r , paleobotany, geology, psychology and anthropology. For a long 

 time as paleobotanist of the U. S. Geological Survey he led as it were a 

 double intellectual life, devoting his office hours to fossil plants and his 

 spare time to the sciences relating to man. He had two reading publics, 

 two groups of scientific acquaintances, two sets of correspondence. 

 When traveling about in Europe one day he might hear his own contri- 

 butions discussed in a university seminar on sociology, while the next 

 day he would be the guest of an Italian count who knew nothing of his 

 sociological writing but loved him as a brother naturalist. Toward the 

 latter part of his life, however, sociology engrossed his energies and it is 

 as sociologist that he will be known to the future. 



Thirty years ago when Dr. Ward made his debut with his monu- 

 mental " Dynamic Sociology," the influence of Spencer was completely 

 dominant save among the handful of socialists. Social evolutionism in- 

 sisted that the improvement of society must of necessity be slow. No 

 factors could be relied on for the promotion of progress save the blind 

 forces which had brought mankind out of prehistoric savagery. The 

 state, being in origin and spirit coercive, could do nothing to accelerate 

 progress, although by ill-advised intermeddling it could do much to 

 hinder it. Beyond protecting life and property the state should keep 

 its hands off. 



Ward was the first who, digging as deep as Spencer and basing him- 

 self with equal confidence upon modern science, built up a totally dif- 

 ferent social philosophy. He rejected the dogma of the superiority of 

 the "natural" and insisted that human progress is a matter of art, is 

 "artificial." There is always an artificial which, from man's point of 

 view, is better than the natural. Instead of " Back to nature ! " the cry 

 ought to be " Forward to art ! n The social progress we have had has 

 come about by the haphazard contributions of a small number of origi- 

 native individuals; but the rate of movement can be enormously ac- 

 celerated provided society intelligently sets about it. 



The state has been coercive, but it is fit for higher purposes. We are 

 still in the stone age of politics. It is practicable gradually to mould 

 government into an instrument of collective intelligence. War, oppres- 



VOL. LXXX1I. — 7. 



