reign. This may or may not turn out to have been a good guess. Meanwhile, in spite of its attendant parade of learning, it remains a guess, nothing more. As a sheer betting proposition, which is all the guess amounts to, the odds would favor any decently restrained formula of denatured sovietism. Then the author proceeds (p. 55):

Hitherto everyone has been free to hope for whatever sort of future one wished. Where there are no facts the feelings govern. In the future it will be everyone's duty to learn of the impending what can and will occur, with the unalterable necessity of a destiny, and quite independent of our personal ideals or those of the age. If we use the questionable word freedom, at all events it is not within our liberty to realize this or that, but merely that which is necessary.

Waiving the trifle that there is nothing whatever in the book which is established as a foundation for this dogmatism, we may be able to imagine ourselves reduced to the belief that the future of the world is fixed in detail by inexorable fate. We cannot, however, imagine ourselves accepting the claim of any visionary who offers himself that he is authorized to reveal the terms of that fate.

At the end of his Introduction the author reduces his apocalypse to conspectus form in three ingenious tables. They dutifully correspond with his own term "morphology." They are verbal-visual symbols of the "soul" of various civilizations as he reacts to them. There is

no pretense of making out an evolutionary nexus. Analogy, naked and unashamed, is all the sanction claimed.

With this showing of the author's plan, everyone competent to evaluate method will know whether it is worth while to follow him in detail. No matter what opinions a writer may set forth if his procedure is intrinsically incompetent to validate any opinion whatsoever.

In brief, the book is exactly what one might expect from an exceptionally gifted writer who is as to vocation a mathematician, as to proclivity a mystic, as to ambition a cosmic philosopher. It is spangled thick with pearls of impression, but, with certain notable exceptions, they are wondrously wrought from messy paste. Varying the figure, almost any paragraph chosen at random might act as a mental cocktail, but therewith the whole story is told, so far as the methodological verdict is at issue. Intellectual nutrition is conspicuously absent. The escapade has substantially the same relation to social science which Jules Verne's writings have to physical science. It kaleidoscopes a large amount of knowledge into a historical extravaganza.

One can hardly believe that the author had ever heard of Barth's Philosophie der Geschichte als Sociologie, or of Robert Flint's Philosophy

of History, first edition. Either work might have suggested enough sober second thoughts to deter a reasonably cautious amateur from adding to the long list of futile attempts to accomplish the impossible.

ALBION W. SMALL

The Grand Strategy of Evolution. The Social Philosophy of a Biologist. By WILLIAM PATTEN, Professor of Biology in Dartmouth College. Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1920. Pp. xviii+412. $5.00.

The universal end, or purpose in life, and in nature, is to construct, to create, or grow. The ways and means of accomplishing that end are mutual service, or co-operative action, and rightness.

Two reciprocal processes are always manifest in this co-operative natureaction: construction and destruction; organization and disorganization. We may also call these universal processes of give and take, good and evil, anabolism and catabolism, egoism and altruism. But as this nature-metabolism, as a whole, is cumulative and progressive, there is but one all-pervading attribute of nature, namely rightness, which becomes manifest to us as constructive, or creative action, or growth.

I shall speak, not as a scientist in the conventions of science. . . . . I have thrown the small verbal cash and other impedimenta of my native province into the melting pot, using wherever possible the irreducible sovereign terms current in all mental exchange. And if you who read will also, for the moment, lay aside your own trappings, coming foot-free with me over some neglected trails, it may be that we shall see more clearly from our new point of view-and perhaps more convincingly because of its scientific setting-that elemental truth which governs alike all the institutions of man and of nature. The right to exist and the obligation to serve are one and inseparable; for to exist is to give, and to give is to receive.

The foregoing sentences are the substance of the Preface of a book which it is an inspiration to read and a duty to recommend. It is the sort of book which carries not the burr or the shell or the boxes or burlaps in which nature or man has packed the makings of knowledge and wisdom; but reality in shape to be converted into immediate understanding. It is a book of the kind which epitomizes an intellectual and moral epoch. It brings forth things new and old in a manner which dramatizes the contrast between the thought-world of its era and that of the era when men reflected the actual world in the latest previous tentative picture. It is the kind of book which is a liberal education in itself. It should take the blur out of eyes that can see in the world of

experience at most nothing better than chaos camouflaged by convention; contradiction contradicted by classification; a darkness and light, good and bad at perpetual war, censored by dogma into a conceptual peace. It is a book fit to emancipate people who have been taught that nature is bad, grace is good, and God a shock-absorber between the two. It is a book to shame the type of pseudo-scientist who has learned no more about the ways of nature than that it is a dog-eat-dog economy, with Bernhardi, Tirpitz, and Hindenburg as its prophets. It is a book for every preacher who is still preaching that evolutionist and Christian are mutually exclusive terms. It is a book for every teacher who hopes there is a continuity and consistency of cosmic processes, including the social realm, but is not quite able to make them out. It is a book for every student of school, or postschool, age who wants to know the best that is known about the ground plan on which mundane affairs proceed.

In the first 280 pages the author epitomizes the ways in which the evolutionary method works in nature. It is the most lucid presentation of the subject to the lay mind that we have seen. The remaining 150 pages indicate how the evolutionary method develops after "man's mental imagery (as) a prime creative factor" begins to be the differentiating element.

The guiding idea in this part of the agreement is formulated as follows (p. 277):

All constructive problems in social life may be resolved into secondary problems of ways and means of extending the principles of co-operative action to larger and larger groups, or conditions, for longer and longer periods. To that end, correspondingly larger experience, more comprehensive vision, and greater tenacity or purpose are essential. But the constructive method will always remain the same.

It would not be surprising if the charge should be brought against the social philosophy of the book that it is merely a revival of the discredited "biological sociology" of a generation ago. On the contrary, even Karl Menger, who subjected that crude technique to the most damaging criticism, would probably admit that the method of this exposition is guiltless of the errors he exposed. The obsolete "biological sociology" started with a fanciful morphological conception of "society" as a body analogous with a physiological organism. The method of this book makes no a priori assumptions. It simply recognizes growth functions as they follow one another out of the physical into the social realm, and it shows how understanding of physical functions may help

to understanding of social functions. It does not arbitrarily superimpose anything biological upon the social. It shows how vision trained by acquaintance with methods of growth on the physical levels may the better detect growth methods on the social levels.

It may be said, too, that the book overworks the structural aspects both of nature and of human relations. The word "architecture" has a prominence out of proportion to the functional aspects of the growth reality which it is supposed to be expounding. In the reviewer's judgment the fault is real, but it is more in appearance than in actual effect. The author's whole emphasis is so obviously upon growth that the statical connotations of the term "architecture" do not obscure the functional process which it is used to clarify.

On the whole, no book in the entire post-Darwinian literature equals this volume as a guide to the congruity between the constructive processes of nature and the moral economics of "the psychic factors," as Lester F. Ward taught us to call them. In spirit it may well remind us of Drummond's Natural Law in the Spiritual World. The later writer, however, is more sure-footed than the earlier author, both on the physical and the spiritual plane, and his book deserves larger and more permanent influence. It would be difficult to overstate the service which Professor Patten has performed in teaching the lesson that the problem of life, personal and public, is not to be solved by "fighting the cosmic process," but by "accepting nature's constructive rightness as the ethical standard, and by adopting her constructive methods as the moral code."

ALBION W. SMALL

Principles of Sociology with Educational Applications. By FREDERICK R. CLOW. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1920. Pp. xiv+436. $1.00.

The phenomenal increase in the popularity of sociology as a study is shown by the demand for its application in institutional fields. This is especially true in education as evidenced by the desire of publishers to get a textbook in educational sociology. The Century Company used that title for W. E. Chancellor's book, when, by no stretch of the imagination, could it be rightfully so named. It devotes only one very sketchy chapter out of thirty-seven to the school and in general pays much less attention to education than does the average textbook on general sociology.

It is to the everlasting credit of Dr. Clow that in his text he has used its proper title, Principles of Sociology with Educational Applications, even though his publishers did print on its back Principles of Educational Sociology. It is a simply worded, well-organized, and thoroughly suggestive textbook in general sociology written especially for teachers. Most of the illustrative material is such as would appeal to them and would be particularly applicable to their problems. It is divided into three parts, "Factors of Society," "Social Organization," and "Social Progress." Part II is the longest and most effective of the three divisions. At the close of each chapter is a series of topics and problems and an ample list of specific readings for classroom use.

One feature of Dr. Clow's book is unique. Long quotations are embodied in the text, either at the end or in the midst of each topic. It thus becomes a sort of combined text and book of readings. This arrangement has both merits and defects. Its value lies in the fact that students must perforce become acquainted with a variety of authors and realize something of the nature and wealth of sociological literature. Also, it buttresses the author's statements with accepted authorities and brings into immediate juxtaposition the social principle and its practical application. Its weakness lies in breaking the continuity of thought and scattering the student's psychic energy. Likewise the effort to combine textual discussion with topical readings requires unnecessary brevity for each. Dr. Clow's treatment of each topic would be more convincing if he had used the whole space for his own discussion and embodied the readings, equally enlarged, in another book, or, perhaps better, had doubled the size of the book. Is it not time for sociologists to demand more time for an elementary course and to use more elaborate textbooks, or if a manual or brief text is used to guarantee that enough laboratory work is done to avoid the imputation, too frequently justified, that it is a "snap" course?

Dr. Clow has given us a thoughtful and much-needed textbook in general sociology for teachers, and it is certain to be widely used, particularly in normal schools.

UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS

WALTER R. SMITH

A Digest of Educational Sociology. By DAVID SNEDDEN. New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1920. Pp. ix+264. (Paper.)

The materials in this volume were evidently assembled as a syllabus and guide for the author's students in his courses in educational sociology.